A Young Woman Realizes Her Future Is In New York In This Excerpt From Guy’s Girl

By Lacy Baugher Milas  |  October 18, 2023 | 1:00pm
Books Features Emma Noyes
A Young Woman Realizes Her Future Is In New York In This Excerpt From Guy’s Girl
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While Emma Noyes’s Guy’s Girl is technically a romance—and has the spice to match—it’s also a gripping coming-of-age story that simultaneously deals with true love, self-love, and growing up. Spanning two years and two cities—New York and Budapest—the novel follows Ginny and Adrian, two people learning how to navigate their early twenties while discovering what it means to fall in love for the first time.

Both Ginny and Adrian have their own emotional and psychological issues to work through that are much more complicated than the question of whether or not they should be together romantically. She’s quietly battling an eating disorder and he carries damaging scars from a childhood trauma. But as they each work on finding a way to heal themselves, their experiences draw them closer together. 

Here’s how the publisher describes the story. 

Ginny Murphy is a total guy’s girl. She’s always found friendships with boys easier to form and keep drama-free – as long as they don’t fall for her, and she doesn’t fall for them. She and her best guy friends have stuck to that. But then she meets Adrian Silvas, the only one who’s ever made her crave more, and Ginny begins to question her own rules.

Piece by piece, Ginny and Adrian begin to fall into something intoxicating, something dangerous. Ginny threatens to destroy the belief Adrian’s held ever since witnessing his own mother’s heartbreak: that love isn’t worth the risk. For Ginny, the stakes could be even higher. Letting Adrian get close could mean exposing a secret she’s long protected: her disordered eating.

Ginny isn’t looking to be saved by someone. But maybe she and Adrian can help each other – if they don’t destroy each other first.

Guy’s Girl will be released on October 24, but we’ve got an early look at the story for you right now. 

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Ginny and the boys spill out into the balmy October night. Clay reaches out one hand to hail a cab.Tristan says something about his father only ever being driven around in black Escalades. Finch pushes Tristan into a recycling bin.’

Ginny bounces in the toes of her white platform shoes—a new purchase, her attempt to blend into the fashionable New York crowd. Goosebumps rise on her arms. Cold as always.

“You okay?” comes a voice from just behind her.

Ginny turns to find Adrian peering down at her. A light breeze feathers the black locks peeking up at the top of his head. Instinctively, she drops her hands, which were rubbing her arms. “Yes,” she says quickly.

“Cold?” 

“No,” she lies

Adrian tilts his head but says nothing, so Ginny looks away, studying the street around them. 

New York is everything Minnesota isn’t. Gone are the chubby, bearded Norwegian men. Here—leggy women the size of mountains. Bodies shaped like telephone wires. Eyes thick with dreamy desire. Ginny wants to drown in it all.

And it isn’t just the models. It’s everyone. Gangly teenagers. A man whose face appears to have gone through a trash compactor. A big-breasted woman with eyes like steel, dressed in a suit Ginny has only ever seen on James Bond.

The style. They reek of it. Chic tailored women in black tights and heeled boots. A waif-thin photographer crouched low on the corner, jeans dangerously close to falling from her body. Hassidic Jewish men with curls swinging beneath boxy black hats. A dog with three legs. A thick-browed man in enormous black headphones, pushing through the crush and belting out the words to a song no one else can hear.

Heather would fit in here, Ginny thought.

“Cabs ah he-ah,” says Clay, using the Jersey Shore accent.

“Cabs ah he-ah!” Finch and Tristan yell back.

They all cram into the tiny yellow sedan. Somehow, Ginny ends up on Adrian’s lap. Neither acknowledges the other. The car speeds off, whisking them toward the bar.

Niagara steams with bodies. Bodies by the front bar. Bodies by the back. Bodies by the photo booth. Bodies by the arcade. Bodies on the dance floor.

The boys lead her through the crush of bodies toward the dance floor. They scream over the music and the voices. Clay heads up the group, holding his hands up over his red hair. Ginny keeps close to the flagpole that is Adrian’s figure. Finch elbows Tristan into a group of girls ordering vodka sodas.

Once they make it to the back, all the boys melt into the dance floor, bouncing up and down and flailing their necks side to side. All the boys except Adrian. He leans down to Ginny and asks, “Should we get drinks?”

Ginny nods, so they elbow over to the small bar shoved into the back corner.

“Coronas?” Adrian asks.

“Sure.”

Adrian turns to the bartender. “Five Coronas, please.” He pulls out his wallet and hands over his credit card.

“Thank you,” Ginny says. Adrian shrugs. When the bartender presents them with five bottles, each with a slice of lime pointed from the rim, Adrian hands two to Ginny.

She hesitates. One Corona is 200 calories, plus the tequila lemonades earlier, and…

You know what? Fuck it.

Ginny squeezes the lime wedge into her bottle and takes a swig.

She must drink three Coronas. They must dance for hours. The DJ plays songs from the early 2000s, and Ginny sings as loud as she can. She dances with her boys. Clay picks her up and spins her around the dance floor as if she weighs nothing.

She can’t remember the last time she had this much fun.

Ginny wanted to make life in Minnesota work. She did. She wanted to strike off on her own and prove to herself that she didn’t need anyone else to live happily.

She was sorely mistaken.

Her whole life, Ginny had a brood of siblings around her. Siblings and friends and friends of siblings. They filled her life. Distracted her from the inside of her head, which, more often than not, was an extremely unpleasant place to live. Made her laugh, even when she didn’t think she could. Until now, Ginny hadn’t realized how essential other people were to her own happiness.

I want to move to New York.

The thought hits her like a shovel to the head.

I want to feel like this all the time. I want to move to New York.

At some point, through the haze of realization, Ginny becomes aware of Adrian talking to a girl in the corner. She’s petite, draped with mousy brown hair and a snow-white romper. She stands on her tip-toes to yell into his ear.

Well, Ginny thinks, that won’t do at all.

Excerpted from GUY’S GIRL by Emma Noyes by Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2023

Guy’s Girl will be released on October 24, but you can pre-order it now. 

Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB

 
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