Shelley Stoehr's books are about the hard journeys that take some young women deep into themselves. Wannabe's Catherine is a good student who daydreams about a writing career, but in her hurry to escape a troubled family life and the social confines of her traditional, working-class Italian neighborhood, she launches herself on an alcohol and cocaine-powered trajectory that lands her dangerously off the mark. Tracey, in Weird on the Outside, flees school and the conflicted relationships she has with her divorced parents for a precarious independence as a topless dancer in a New York City strip club. And in Crosses, punked-out Nancy and her friend Katie deal with "everything awful" in their lives by compulsively cutting themselves. When they aren't having sex with their more straight-laced boyfriends or chugging vodka secreted out of the house in a shampoo bottle, they are carving crosses into their skin with...