It tells the coming-of-age story of a teenage girl named Beckett, and addresses themes of innocence, loss, mental illness, sexuality, and femininity.

As she grapples with the death of her mother, the tragedies at her school, and the incipience of her menstruation, she finds herself wrapped up in a media-saturated world of mixed messages, in which beauty is everything and the arrival of womanhood is equated to the loss of innocence.

Like Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides and Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, Mendelsohn’s story muffles its death and sorrow in terminal irony.

Must reading for anybody who thinks teenagers today have gotten bloated with entitlement: a scarlet will-o’-the-wisp fantasy in which adults and adulthood aren't stupid stiffs but agents of unimaginable evil.”[3] The Village Voice wrote, “Innocence is a kind of Rosemary’s Baby channeled through J.D.

Salinger….It’s a graceful, delusionary teenage thriller unusually in touch with young character’s emotional workings, and, at the same time, a book by someone who clearly understands the tricks that make Stephen King’s pages turn.” The Baltimore Sun called Innocence “A brilliant gothic tale…a harrowing cry of anguish, the siren song of a generation that believes continuing to live beyond one’s teens is a matter of ambiguous choice.