Although Pay as You Exit is a novel about a high school girl written by a woman barely out of her teens, the writing shows considerable poise and Pay as You Exit 3803 maturity. At the same time, the authentic voice of an intelligent teen-ager comes through, not the voice of an experienced woman writing about her adolescence in retrospect. As a result, an adult can enjoy this novel as a window into the realistic world of a seventeen-year-old in the 1980s, and teens can find a clear articulation of some of their most important concerns about reaching maturity.

The first-person narrator freely discloses her feelings throughout the novel; yet even during Sarah's moments of despair, the prose never lapses into maudlin excess. Goldman trusts the situation and her simple descriptive words to convey the emotion of the moment. Throughout the novel, the author creates scenes that...