Oh how I wish to have had read this when I was seventeen!! I would've been absolutely obsessed with this book.

And I think the 17 year old who is somehow still tucked in the back of my brain is obsessed with this book. Hangsaman is Shirley Jackson's the Bell Jar, Girl Interrupted, Prozac Nation, Bunny... 

Told in three parts, the novella follows Natalie as she moves from living with her parents and younger brother to spending her first semester at college. Natalie is bookish, lonely, melancholic, traumatized... and struggles making friends conventionally. She eventually connects with her English teacher's wife, and later with another outsider. There's tarot cards, they're fantasies of destroying whole buildings, and there's a darkness in Natalie's head that is only found in teenage girls. The book is told in third person but with a heavy bias toward's Natalie's interpretation of events. And interpretation gets weirder and weirder.

Highly recommended!! 4.75 stars that I may round up to an even 5.