For readers of My Dark Vanessa and Lullabies for Little Criminals, this important, electrifying novel about the agony and exhilaration of being a teenage girl will challenge you, unsettle you and ask you to look at your own experiences with perversions of power.

Katie is used to being let down. Her best friend abandoned her for a boy, her mom is a hypochondriac who spends most days on the couch, and the guys at school can do whatever they want while the girls are stuck following the rules.

All Katie wants is to be seen. So when she finds an online world where women aren't ashamed of what they want and consent doesn't feel like the grey area she's used to, she thinks she's finally in control. But as Katie becomes more and more enmeshed in this virtual playground, she begins to realize her newfound power may just be an illusion.

Sharp Edges is the story of a girl lost in a grown-up world far darker than she could have imagined—searching for someone to guide her to a place where she can be sixteen again.

Leah Mol's profile page

LEAH MOL is a writer and editor who graduated from the Creative Writing Program at UBC. Her fiction won the 2018 CBC Short Story Prize and the 2020 Bronwen Wallace Award. She lives in Toronto. Sharp Edges is her debut novel. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram @leahmol.

"[Sharp Edges is a] confident first novel, making Mol one to watch in the years ahead." —Winnipeg Free Press

"Sharp Edges will remind you of the nightmares of being a teenager, and of how some of those worries actually never leave us alone." —Maisonneuve

"Although this is Leah Mol's debut novel, she writes with moments of brilliance. . . . Mol's writing is intense and [the protagonist's] thoughts feel so real that [Sharp Edges] almost feels like non-fiction. . . . Mol is a talented writer and you will remember Sharp Edges." —Divine

"A literary Euphoria. As addictive as it is disturbing, Leah Mol's debut novel deeply interrogates power, isolation, sexuality and girlhood—and the sometimes scary places those intersect. I couldn't look away." —Alicia Elliott, author of A Mind Spread Out on the Ground
"Leah Mol's debut novel explores the burgeoning sexuality of teenaged Katie, and delves into what it feels like to live in the female body. In subtle and desperate and shocking ways, Katie explores the world of sex that is available to her. She allows herself to exist in the pornographic imagination and tries to locate her own physical desire in the bodies of boys and men. But ultimately Katie is searching for self-knowledge that will allow her to become a subject, a human being whose sexuality belongs to them. Sharp Edges is a treacherous, provocative and luminous novel about girlhood. Leah Mol is a brand new talent with a sly, devastating and remarkable eye for details of the female experience." —Heather O'Neill, author of When We Lost Our Heads

"Sharp Edges is a visceral portrait of a millennial teen girl exploring her sexuality, mending broken friendships, and keeping unspeakable secrets in the early aughts of the digital age. Leah Mol's debut novel is a fiery, gut-wrenching must-read." —Andrea Werhun, author of Modern Whore