Aimee Bender’s stunning debut collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt , proved her to be one of the freshest voices in American fiction. Now, in her first novel, she builds on that early promise. Mona Gray was ten when her father contracted a mysterious illness and she became a quitter, abandoning each of her talents just as pleasure became intense. The only thing she can’t stop doing is math: She knocks on wood, adds her steps, and multiplies people in the park against one another. When Mona begins teaching math to second-graders, she finds a ready audience. But the difficult and wonderful facts of life keep intruding. She finds herself drawn to the new science teacher, who has an unnerving way of seeing through her intricately built façade. Bender brilliantly directs her characters, giving them unexpected emotional depth and setting them in a calamitous world, both fancifully surreal and startlingly familiar. “Intelligent and engaging… [A] fanciful and original take on the quietly helter-skelter world that lies within.”– The New York Times “Light as a zephyr and unique as a snowflake.”– The Washington Post “An achingly idiosyncratic story…rendered…with eloquence, hilarity, and ominous precision.” –The Boston Globe s stunning debut collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt , proved her to be one of the freshest voices in American fiction. Now, in her first novel, she builds on that early promise. Mona Gray was ten when her father contracted a mysterious illness and she became a quitter, abandoning each of her talents just as pleasure became intense. The only thing she can t stop doing is math: She knocks on wood, adds her steps, and multiplies people in the park against one another. When Mona begins teaching math to second-graders, she finds a ready audience. But the difficult and wonderful facts of life keep intruding. She finds herself drawn to the new science teacher, who has an unnerving way of seeing through her intricately built façade. Bender brilliantly directs her characters, giving them unexpected emotional depth and setting them in a calamitous world, both fancifully surreal and startlingly familiar. Aimee Bender's stunning debut collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt," proved her to be one of the freshest voices in American fiction. Now, in her first novel, she builds on that early promise. Mona Gray was ten when her father contracted a mysterious illness and she became a quitter, abandoning each of her talents just as pleasure became intense. The only thing she can't stop doing is math: She knocks on wood, adds her steps, and multiplies people in the park against one another. When Mona begins teaching math to second-graders, she finds a ready audience. But the difficult and wonderful facts of life keep intruding. She finds herself drawn to the new science teacher, who has an unnerving way of seeing through her intricately built faade. Bender brilliantly directs her characters, giving them unexpected emotional depth and setting them in a calamitous world, both fancifully surreal and startlingly familiar. Aimee Bender is the author of the novels  The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cak e—a  New York Times  bestseller—and  An Invisible Sign of My Own , and of the collections  The Girl in the Flammable Skirt  and  Willful Creatures . Her works have been widely anthologized and have been translated into sixteen languages. She lives in Los Angeles. 1 On my twentieth birthday, I bought myself an ax. This was the best gift I got in a decade. Before I saw it, shining on the wall of the hardware store like a lover made from steel and wood, I'd given up completely on the birthday celebration. On my nineteenth, my mother had kicked me out of the house. On my eighteenth, I had a party of two people, and after an hour, both claimed allergies, and went home, sneezing. On my seventeenth, I made myself a chocolate cake, but since I didn't really want to eat it, stirred bug poison in with the mix. It rose beautifully, the best ever, and when I took it out of the oven, a perfect brown dome, I just circled the pan for a few hours, breathing in that warm buttery air. Some ants ate the crumbs on the counter and died. On my sixteenth, my aunt sent me a beautiful scarlet silk dress, which smelled and felt as delicate as the inside of a wrist. Stroking it in my lap, I sifted through the phone book, finally picking out the name of a woman who lived at an address with 16s in it. Then I mailed the dress to her. Red is not my color. On my fifteenth, fourteenth, thirteenth, twelfth, and eleventh birthdays, my mother and I went shopping, and each year, by the end, one of us was in tears of frustration because I didn't like anything, and I said I really didn't want anything, except, maybe, a new math workbook. You had to send away for those. They came from a big number barn in the South. My mother shook her head; she refused, flat-out, to buy me math supplies for my birthday, so finally we just put