Teenaged Eugenia has just moved to Los Angeles from Rome, and is about to start school. The year is 1992, and Eugenia is feeling sharp in her new Reebok Pumps. “If you worry,” her glamorous Italian movie star mother reminds her, “just pump your shoes.”

Sneakers turn out to be the first of many bad choices that Eugenia makes in Chiara Barzini’s arresting and unforgettable new novel, Things That Happened Before the Earthquake. When Eugenia walks through the door of her San Fernando Valley high school, she discovers the local girls favor heels; the boys dress in gang colors.