The Golden Day

There were only eleven of them, like eleven sisters all the same age in a large family.... On the television news they heard gunfire and the sound of helicopter blades and bombs falling. The little girls hung on to the brink of a hugeness that they knew was there but had no way of discovering.

The Vietnam War rages overseas, but back at home, in a year that begins with the hanging of one man and ends with the drowning of another, eleven schoolgirls embrace their own chilling history when the...