Where the Girls Are Kept

By Mel Hammond

In a post-overturned Roe v. Wade America, native Californian Rowan is stranded in a conservative Ohio town that's controlled by a cult masquerading as an MLM, where girls who step out of line are known to die under mysterious circumstances--and she's next--in this contemporary horror retelling of Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby.

Rowan never saw herself leaving California, much less the summer before senior year of high school. But when her entire social life blows up, her mom loses her job, and they inherit a distant aunt's Queen Anne Victorian home, suddenly disappearing to rural Ohio doesn't sound so bad. Surely she can survive one year in the middle of nowhere, painting murals in an old fixer-upper for her art school applications.

Until several strange things start happening at once. Rowan discovers a series of obituaries--those of teen girls, who allegedly boarded with Rowan's late aunt before her own death. Girls whose lives are punctuated by drug overdoses that don't quite add up. Rowan also can't seem to get her birth control prescription refilled within an hour radius of this wretched place--and she is not looking forward to explaining all of her inevitable menstrual cycle-induced absences from school on her college applications.

Worst of all, the next-door neighbors parade their essential oil multi-level marketing scheme around town like they've unlocked the elixir of life--but it's clear to Rowan that the culty underpinings are concealing something much more sinister.

Will Rowan be able to get out before it's too late?

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HKHHTYJX
• ISBN13: 9798217121915
• Release Date: June 2027
• Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.89 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.8" x 5.5"
• Age Range: 14 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 9 and higher