The Alice Marshall School for Girls is set in a sprawling and remote area of wilderness in Idaho, and it’s where girls who need to escape their past are sent to discover themselves. It’s sort of a last-chance resort, but it’s not anything luxurious or enviable. The girls live in basic cabins, have virtually no rights, and have to endure countless hours of therapy (which in this case isn’t always traditional).

Lida arrives at the camp after something bad has happened in her life. That’s about as vague and as descriptive as it comes, of course, but for good reason. She’s rooming with Jules, a girl who Lida feels doesn’t belong because there’s no way she has a broken past, and she’s also rooming with Boone, a girl who has burned a building down and who Lida learns has earned quite the reputation around school. She’s experienced some of Boone’s terror herself when she wakes up after her first night in her room with a new hair cut. One Boone gave her.

Not much happens, aside from Lida’s settling in, until another new girl arrives at Alice Marshall. New girl Gia’s captured the attention of nearly everyone at camp, but she attaches herself to Lida quickly, and Lida couldn’t be happier. In fact, she’s so happy to have garnered Gia’s attention that she finds herself unable to avoid thinking about Gia. During one of their group therapy sessions, despite keeping the truth about what brought her to Alice Marshall locked up and kept only in her own notebook, Lida feels comfortable enough to let Gia in. To be fair, it’s less about comfort here and more about the fact their group leader forces girls to pair up and spill their Things. But it becomes more about comfort when Gia admits to not having her Thing written down and won’t be sharing it. Instead, she just reads and absorbs Lida’s, and Lida doesn’t question. She accepts.

Lida also finds herself telling Gia something she knows about Boone — something she shouldn’t have spilled — and it’s in this instance everything unravels.

The Girls of No Return can’t be summed up simply or easily because it’s a complex novel about friendship. I don’t really think the flap copy does much for describing it, either. It’s a twisted story, set up in a non-traditional format that is at once perplexing and straightforward. It comes down to the fact as readers, we know as little about Lida as anyone else does. From the beginning, we’re on the outside looking in, despite the story being told from her point of view. We know there’s something wrong with her because she’s at this camp, but we’re never sure what. She doesn’t tell us, and she doesn’t tell anyone else around her. See, even in the big reveal moment with Gia, we don’t get anything. Lida doesn’t tell us what’s wrong with her; we only get to know Gia knows.

But then Gia turns around and uses that knowledge against Lida. First, it’s in the bathhouse. Then, it’s during another group session as payback for an incident involving Boone. In both of these scenes, we finally see Lida’s bricks start to crumble. As she starts to fall apart and her Things start to fall out of her control, we witness Lida understanding why she’s at Alice Marshall and how attending this school for troubled girls is exactly what she needed.

Saldin’s debut is dark, but I found it took quite a while for the threads of the story to come together enough to buy into the premise — as I mentioned, the flap copy didn’t do much for me. It describes the book as dark, but I didn’t believe it for nearly 250 pages. There were elements of darkness, but they weren’t necessarily at the forefront because Lida didn’t want them to be. Whatever she suppressed from herself she also suppressed from the reader. It’s an interesting approach to the story, and I think it’s effective, but I found myself bored through a number of scenes because nothing really happens. Lida’s so removed from everything and she removes the reader, too. While it’s smart and makes the end work well, the book was a little too lengthy to pull it off as strongly as it could have.

Before I go on, I’m going to warn the next few things could potentially be spoilers. I don’t think they are, but I can’t be certain since this is the kind of book that will be read many different ways. The trick to the book is whether you believe Lida or not. She’s not the most reliable narrator, and we know this from the beginning. The book’s not a traditional narrative structure: the end comes first. Or what we think is the end comes first. And then it comes again. And again. And again. So the question becomes what’s really the beginning, what’s really the story, and what’s really the end.

I found my answers to everything in the chapter preceding the final one. I felt like I pulled together the resolutions and quite liked how I was able to connect them, but then the final chapter came along. While many who don’t pick up on the clues may find the last chapter to be the right conclusion, I thought it was too much. It over explained, and for how little we actually get spelled out throughout the book, I was a little let down. Does it fit Lida? Definitely. Did it work with everything she learned from Boone? Sure. But it was laid out a little too nicely for me. It almost detracted from the darkness of those final few scenes in the book. (This is the definite spoiler area, so skip down to the next paragraph if you’re sensitive to that) — it works out exactly as Boone laid out in her discussion with Lida about how she can always write her stories the way she wants to if she’s not accountable to anyone else. It’s all a game of possession, one between friends and one between stories. Boone would know a lot about that, seeing she’s one who has that same possessive magic as Lida but in a more physical, rather than mental, way. So by starting the book at the end, the reader is twisted and reconsiders everything and whether or not it was the real story or the story Lida simply wanted to tell. The faults are everywhere throughout the book in leading to that sort of reading and interpretation (including the changing relationships among all the girls, the changing relationship between Terri and Lida, the cutting in and of itself). Moreover, the idea of trust and betrayal work even more in that sense. My disappointment comes in not the actual conclusion but in the fact I felt tricked and strung along for a long time here. I almost feel like I was cheated out of story. Had the last chapter not happened, I’d have been more satisfied. Not because it’d resolve any more answers, but it would have maybe left more questions open.

What stood out to me throughout the book was Saldin’s writing — it’s strong, and she is able to paint a portrait of rural wilderness in a way I haven’t read in a long time. Setting plays a large role in the story, and Saldin offers it to us in the best way possible. Not only that, but she weaves in metaphors that, when you catch them, settle earlier, fragmented bits of story right into place. There are no shortcuts here.

Character development and the relationships among the girls rang true to me. It’s not outright cattiness, but it’s more subtle how they get to one another. The relationship between Lida and Gia reminded me a lot of Grace and Mandarin in Kirstin Hubbard’s Like Mandarin, though in Saldin’s book, there’s less a question about which side of the road either girl stands on when it comes to friendship vs. romantic interest. It’s not just hinted at; it’s laid out blatantly (there are a series of lines about how a place like Alice Marshall makes girls interested in other girls).

It’s not a short book nor a quick read, and though I think this will find a readership among girls who like stories about friendship, it’s not a mean girls story. Flap copy says this one would appeal to fans of Cut or Speak, and while I agree with that, I don’t think it’s going to appeal as broadly as those two books do. This is much more literary, much slower of a build, and much less conclusive than either McCormick or Anderson’s books. It reminded me a lot of Nina de Gramont’s Gossip of the Starlings, particularly in style, and of Jo Knowles’s Lessons from a Dead Girl. Hand The Girls of No Return to readers who like a challenge.

Review copy received from the publisher. The Girls of No Return is available now.