Amy Scribner

NonfictionSelf-Help

Meditations for Mortals

Review by Amy Scribner

It’s time to let go of the idea that there is another checklist, another productivity hack, that will lead us to a nirvana where we can finally relax. If you feel like you need permission for this, British journalist and time management guru Oliver Burkeman outlines an exit from the hamster wheel in Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts. 

“We set out to make mincemeat of our inboxes,” he writes, “defeat our to-read piles, or impose order on our schedules; we try to optimize our levels of fitness or focus, and feel obliged to be always enhancing our parenting skills, competence in personal finance, or understanding of world events.” He flies in the face of generations of self-help books, arguing with kindness and empathy that there is no magic wand to complete every task and attain total control. In fact, we don’t need to “do it all” . . . at all.

For example, Burkeman embraces what he calls “scruffy hospitality”: There’s no need to wait until your house is sparkling clean and you have mastered a gourmet menu to invite people over. Just pick up the major piles of stuff, make spaghetti and feed your friends! In a chapter titled “Too Much Information,” Burkeman writes that we will never be able to consume all the books and all the magazines and all the podcasts, even at double speed. Instead, “treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket.” Choose a few books as they flow past you, and let the rest go with the current.

Meditations for Mortals is a generous book chock-full of hard-earned advice from someone who has felt the same pressures we all have, but has thought about it more deeply than most. Burkeman suggests that we treat his book’s chapters as daily meditations, reading one per day, and that is likely a satisfying course of action. But his compelling set of mini-lessons may have readers swiftly sprinting through. Burkeman will likely forgive us the imperfection.

Oliver Burkeman flies in the face of generations of self-help books, inviting readers to let go of their desire for control and get off the hamster wheel of endless to-do lists and TBR stacks.
NonfictionMemoir

Drawn Testimony

Review by Amy Scribner

In her decades as a courtroom artist, Jane Rosenberg has used her trusty pastels to sketch some of the most infamous moments in American legal history.

She was there when Susan Smith apologized to her estranged husband for drowning their two young sons in a South Carolina lake, and when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found guilty of the carnage at the Boston Marathon bombing. When Donald Trump appeared in a Manhattan courtroom to be arraigned on charges of falsifying business records, Rosenberg was there to capture his “Day-Glo complexion: base layers of red, purple, even green and blue, that were softened and smoothed over with lighter pinks and whites, accented with strokes of burnt sienna.”

Drawn Testimony: My Four Decades as a Courtroom Sketch Artist takes a mesmerizing look at this rarest of professions. In a time of Court TV and paparazzi, the idea of artists capturing legal drama through drawing is almost quaint. Yet Rosenberg’s images continue to be broadcast by news outlets around the world: Woody Allen and Mia Farrow sitting stone-faced during their custody battle, Harvey Weinstein crumpled in a wheelchair listening to victim impact statements, John Gotti with his shock of silver hair. Ghislaine Maxwell, Bill Cosby, Tom Brady: She has sketched them all. (And in the case of Brady, had her artwork go viral for all the wrong reasons when she struggled to capture the particular angles of his face. She calls the ensuing media attention “a storm which struck with hurricane force.”)

As talented as Rosenberg is at drawing, she is an equally gifted writer. She describes the technique she has honed over so many years and cases, how she quickly builds sketches that capture singular moments in court, even as the action continues in front of her. She writes in visceral detail about being one of the few in-person witnesses during the most vulnerable moments of so many famous and powerful people. An utterly absorbing read, Drawn Testimony captures “the rhythms of a criminal trial and the layers of humanity they could contain—stunning tales of ambition, betrayal, family, and bloodshed.”

 

For four decades, courtroom sketch artist Jane Rosenberg has portrayed the famous and infamous at high-profile trials. She tells all in Drawn Testimony.
FictionPopular Fiction

Lies and Weddings

Review by Amy Scribner

The rollicking Lies and Weddings starts in Hong Kong before skipping to a tony estate in the English countryside, then on to a Kona clifftop in Hawai’i. And that’s just in the first 22 pages.

Since Crazy Rich Asians, Kevin Kwan has been known for globe-spanning, culture-melding stories. In his delightful new novel, we meet Rufus Gresham, a handsome viscount whose father is the Earl of Greshamsbury whose mother, Lady Augusta Gresham, is a former supermodel. Sounds impressive, but the Greshams are in crushing debt thanks to the family’s expensive tastes.

Enter Dr. Thomas Tong and his daughter, Dr. Eden Tong, both physicians who live in a cottage on the Greshamsbury property. Thomas and the earl are best friends from their college days, and Thomas has helped connect his friend with a wealthy yet mysterious benefactor. Eden and Rufus have been best friends since they were children, but when they meet up in Hawai’i for the wedding of Rufus’ sister, sparks fly in more ways than one.

Like every Kwan novel, Lies and Weddings is chock-full of scheming characters and breathtakingly lavish scenes. I’m not cultured enough to recognize all the brand names and jet-setting locations Kwan drops, but that doesn’t take away from the absolute pleasure of reading about rich and beautiful people behaving—for the most part—very badly. Kwan remains a cheekily hilarious writer, with footnotes that give each chapter an extra kick: Eden and a friend eat lunch at a Los Angeles hot spot, and see “a certain British pop star who wants to be an actor having lunch with a certain A-list producer, a certain billionaire film investor kid, and also a legendary supermodel and her influencer daughter, and the daughter’s boyfriend, who also wants to act.” As the footnote tells us, “Out of respect for their privacy, these high-profile individuals will not be identified by their names (or their schools).”

I drank this book up like the chilled bottles of Sancerre these characters are constantly being served. Pure pleasure.

Like every Kevin Kwan novel, Lies and Weddings is chock-full of scheming characters and breathtakingly lavish scenes.
NonfictionSocial ScienceMedicine

Invisible Labor

Review by Amy Scribner

Author Rachel Somerstein experienced a traumatic cesarean section with the birth of her first child. When the epidural failed, she felt every moment of the surgery, which continued while she screamed and was restrained by nurses. After her daughter was born, Somerstein spent years trying to make sense of what had happened. 

No wonder, then, that Somerstein dove into the topic of the most common surgery in the world. The result is Invisible Labor: The Untold Story of the Cesarean Section, a sobering and deeply interesting look at the history of and debate around C-sections. Though they may account for one third of births in the United States, Somerstein’s research makes clear C-sections are still largely viewed as an inferior way to give birth. 

“When it comes to birth, the term ‘natural’ is at once fuzzy and imprecise,” Somerstein writes. “Does it mean vaginal? Vaginal and unmedicated? At home? In the water? Regardless of the definition—which changes depending on who you ask—it most definitely doesn’t include C-sections. . . . On multiple levels, the rhetoric around natural birth implies that C-sections are bad, and the mothers who have them are bad, too.”

While judgment and lack of support can impact a new mother’s well-being, in a later chapter, Somerstein explores an even more insidious side of C-sections: Women of color are more likely to feel pressure from their provider to have a C-section, given how birthing experiences and outcomes are worsened and complicated by systemic racism in medical settings. A Black woman who declines a C-section may be viewed as aggressive, whereas their white counterpart may be viewed as well-educated and decisive. 

This is a provocative and well-researched book. New motherhood can be a profoundly joyful time, yet it also can be isolating, painful and shameful, and Somerstein writes that she wrote it for mothers looking to “see themselves reflected in the story of birth.” But Invisible Labor also makes clear that we still have a long way to go in adequately supporting women’s health, and therefore, it is of value to us all.

Invisible Labor is a sobering, provocative and deeply researched look at the history of C-sections and how they impact women’s lives.
NonfictionSocial Science

Death Row Welcomes You

Review by Amy Scribner

In his haunting debut, Death Row Welcomes You: Visiting Hours in the Shadow of the Execution Chamber, Tennessee journalist Steven Hale sheds light on a rarely seen part of American society: the places where more than 2,700 people await execution by the state.

Hale’s reporting began when, after a decade-long lull, Tennessee began executing the condemned at speed. He witnessed the first of seven executions that would take place over two years. Tennessee and other states have struggled to acquire the preferred lethal injection drug, pentobarbital, and a new three-drug protocol to be used instead was challenged in Tennessee court for amounting to cruel and unusual punishment—to no avail. 

A former staff writer for the alt-weekly Nashville Scene, Hale reports from Riverbend Maximum Security Institution through the lens of a group of regular visitors who provide condemned men with friendship and compassion in the years (sometimes decades) leading up to their death, including a Nashville reverend who has acted as an advocate and spiritual advisor for death row inmates since the 1970s. Hale writes vividly about the fear and boredom that marks daily life in a maximum-security prison, and how the visitors offer relief and fellowship. They bring friends and neighbors to their weekly meetings, including those who support capital punishment, thinking that the “best way to expose the inhumanity of the death penalty was to expose people to the humanity of the men condemned to it.” 

Death Row Welcomes You is an engrossing if sometimes harrowing read. Hale starkly recounts the crimes that led to death sentences, including gruesome murders, brutal sexual assaults and drug deals gone horribly wrong. Yet the book does not fixate on grisly details the way so many salacious podcasts and TV shows do. Hale delves into the childhoods of the men he profiles, many of whom experienced abject poverty, neglect and abuse, and presents these facts as important context in which to view the full scope of their crimes and subsequent state-sanctioned killing. These stories are balanced by moving accounts of the supportive relationships among the condemned men, like when a man chose to forgo his prison-provided last meal in favor of communing with his fellows over homemade pizzas, the ingredients plucked from their personal stashes. 

“The people, experiences and research that make up this book have changed my life,” Hale writes. “I hope that by preserving them here I can contribute in some small way to the idea that we are, all of us, capable of terrible and beautiful things.” Readers will reflect on this captivating, deeply reported story for years to come.  

Death Row Welcomes You is an enthralling, deeply reported story that captures the humanity of the condemned men on Tennessee’s death row.
NonfictionMemoirFood & Drink

Slow Noodles

Review by Amy Scribner

After fleeing Cambodia during the brutal regime of Pol Pot, Chantha Nguon spent decades in increasingly desperate poverty, first in urban Vietnam, then the squalor of Thailand refugee camps and finally in the malarial jungles of Cambodia. Through it all, Nguon relied on the delicious food of her childhood for comfort. In her heartbreaking, exquisitely told memoir, Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes, Nguon tells her story with co-author Kim Green.

At the end of each chapter, Nguon shares a recipe; some are delicious and intricate (sour chicken lime soup, village style), others bittersweet (silken rebellion fish fry or as Nguon’s subtitle calls it, “How to Make Unfresh Fish Taste Rather Delicious”). Most of these she learned sitting in her prosperous childhood kitchen, watching her mother and older sister create magical dishes they shared with their less wealthy neighbors.

That generosity got Nguon through her years in exile. She writes of sharing resources when she had so few, and making friends who would find and carry each other again and again. In the Thai refugee camps, where Nguon and others waited years for even an interview, they found a chosen family. “We refugees had nothing,” she writes, “but many of us drew close, and found ways to ease one another’s suffering. . . . Here in camp, we were all poor and full of loss. Often, that united us.”

Throughout Slow Noodles, Nguon returns to that theme: loss and despair giving way to strength. While this is a war memoir, it also is ultimately a story of hope. Despite the decades of horror the Khmer Rouge inflicted on millions of Cambodians, Nguon infuses her memoir with a spirit of persistence and defiance. Even in the face of evil, she continued cooking her childhood dishes, speaking her childhood language and slowly, slowly making her way home again.

“When you have nothing, weakness can destroy you,” Nguon writes. “No one would carry me out of the jungle. I would have to carry myself.”

In her memoir, Slow Noodles, Cambodian writer Chantha Nguon survives the terror of the Khmer Rouge and keeps her family recipes intact.
NonfictionMemoir

The Fruit Cure

Review by Amy Scribner

As an elite college athlete, Jacqueline Alnes started experiencing mysterious, excruciating neurological episodes in which she could not speak, walk or see clearly. Finding no help from doctors and little support from her demanding running coach, Alnes was forced to quit the activity that her identity revolved around. Desperate for answers, she turned to an online community espousing the benefits of a fruit-based, raw food diet. She found herself drawn in, eschewing all other food piece by piece.

You’d be forgiven for suspecting that Alnes is about to pitch you on a life-changing wellness regimen that ends in health. But The Fruit Cure: The Story of Extreme Wellness Turned Sour is more intriguing. It’s a cautionary tale about falling prey to too-good-to-be-true solutions to complex medical issues.

Fruitarianism didn’t restore Alnes’ body to health; it led to disordered eating that gave her a sense of control when she felt powerless. This struggle is what makes The Fruit Cure a deeply compelling read: Alnes dives deep into the shame humans have felt about their imperfect bodies since ancient times. She poignantly conveys the ways in which doctors and charlatans alike have taken advantage of those desperate to meet a physical ideal or simply be released from pain and medical anxiety. “My desire for a cure,” Alnes writes, “outweighed my ability to think critically about the sources of my information.”

Alnes also explores a decidedly more modern concept: the nature of parasocial relationships, like the one she developed with the online fruitarian figureheads who called themselves Freelee and Durianrider. She obsessively watched their videos on social media, “a tilt-a-whirl of fruit-forward, anti-fat content.” Their cult of personality made it easier to believe outlandish claims, like that cooked food pollutes the body. The spell was eventually broken for Alnes when she stopped binging on social media and started reconnecting with family and friends. “The more I lived in the world, away from my screen,” she writes, “the voices saying eggs were chicken ‘menses’ and dairy was an animal ‘secretion’ grew quieter.”

Alnes, now an English professor, writes with honesty and a clear curiosity about how her own experience reflects larger societal trends. The Fruit Cure is a spellbinding reminder of how susceptible we are to quick fixes, and, ultimately, how our communities can save us.

Jacqueline Alnes’ memoir, The Fruit Cure, is a spellbinding, cautionary tale about falling prey to fad diets to resolve medical ailments.
NonfictionMusicBiography

Madonna

Review by Amy Scribner

At age 65, she is still one of the most recognizable women in America, making news with every appearance and regularly posting to her 19.1 million Instagram followers. But Madonna in the 1980s and 1990s? It’s impossible to describe how thoroughly she dominated pop culture: groundbreaking videos like the sleek black-and-white “Vogue” and the gorgeously provocative “Like a Prayer”; the “Like a Virgin” wedding cake performance at the inaugural MTV Video Music Awards; the infamous coffee table book, Sex.

In this vivid and memorable biography, journalist Mary Gabriel draws on previous interviews and reporting to paint a satisfyingly full picture of the life of Madonna Louise Ciccone. Born in 1958 to devout Catholic parents in Michigan, Madonna’s earliest years were spent in a boisterous and loving family. But her mother died of breast cancer when Madonna was only 5, and her remaining childhood was marked by deep sadness and chaos. Madonna escaped through performance—she was a serious dancer and immersed herself in the Detroit music scene.

She chased her dreams to New York City, living in apartments crawling with roaches and working dead-end jobs while pursuing music and acting. Gabriel brings 1980s New York to life: the gritty city where young talents went to find fame, and where gay men (including many of Madonna’s dear friends) were getting sick and dying of a mysterious new disease. The biography deftly sets Madonna’s story against the backdrop of the times, reflecting on how her art was influenced by religion, race, sex and women’s rights.

The artist is such a provocateur that her philanthropic work has sometimes been overshadowed. Gabriel provides a reminder of Madonna’s efforts to raise money for AIDS research and other causes. While Madonna: A Rebel Life can occasionally smack of research paper (it is chock-full of footnotes), it is still a thoroughly entertaining and deeply nostalgic look at one of the true icons of our time. Gabriel manages to tell a fresh story, even with a subject as scrutinized as Madonna. As the star once said, “There’s a lot more to me than can possibly be perceived in the beginning.”

Mary Gabriel’s vivid, memorable biography of Madonna takes a fresh look at a true icon of our time.
FictionPopular Fiction

Real Love

Review by Amy Scribner

Maya has it all figured out: She’s on the fast track to a promotion at her investment firm, she has a great apartment in Miami, and she’s still dating her handsome college sweetheart, a retired professional football player who will almost certainly put a ring on it sometime in the near future.

So when the producers of “Real Love”—a thinly veiled fictional version of the Bachelor/Bachelorette franchise, in which author Rachel Lindsay starred—offer Maya the chance to be the lead on the upcoming season, she declines. Her best friend, Delilah, gets the part, and almost immediately, Maya questions her decision. Her boyfriend breaks up with her, and suddenly the life she envisioned is up in the air. As she watches Delilah have the time of her life on “Real Love,” Maya must reckon with her own path.

In 2022, Lindsay released a dishy essay collection, Miss Me With That, which included reflections on her stint as the first Black Bachelorette. (In 2019, she married the winner of her season.) Real Love is Lindsay’s first novel, and it’s pure fun, a fizzy and relatable mixture of female friendship, romance and career struggles, with a dash of behind-the-scenes reality TV. 

Lindsay perfectly captures the uncertainty and exhilaration of single life, imbuing Maya with shades of Carrie Bradshaw, another woman in her early 30s trying to solidify her identity and navigate romantic relationships with the help of her friends. Unlike Carrie’s penchant for cosmopolitans, Maya’s drink of choice is a simple Crown whisky and Coke. Also unlike Carrie, Maya is firmly in the Ann Taylor and J. Crew fashion camp, which is a source of endless chagrin for her stylish and audacious younger sister, Ella, who is a hilarious foil to Maya’s sensible personality.

Maya has doggedly pursued her career and stayed in a safe but faltering relationship for years, so the possibility of change is exciting and terrifying. Should she stay in Miami and climb the corporate ladder? Move to Seattle with a kind and hot artist? Drop everything and travel? Her ultimate decision is less important than the simple act of choosing a course based on what she wants for the first time.

Real Love is a charming and pleasurable read. I raise a glass of Crown and Coke to Lindsay.

Real Love is pure fun, a fizzy and relatable mixture of female friendship, romance and career struggles, with a dash of behind-the-scenes reality TV.
NonfictionHumorHistory

Alexandra Petri’s US History

Review by Amy Scribner

Imagine if Elizabeth Cady Stanton had been distracted from her suffrage efforts because she fell in love, Hallmark movie-style, with a local Seneca Falls man. Or if Emily Dickinson contacted tech support but could only communicate in her trademark poetic style. Or if the Gettysburg Address had been written by “The West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin.

Alexandra Petri has long entertained Washington Post readers with her absurdist columns on the latest political and pop culture news. In her dazzling book of historical humor, Alexandra Petri’s US History: Important American Documents (I Made Up), she shows again why legendary humor writer Dave Barry called her “the funniest person in Washington.” Petri’s seemingly effortless ability to reimagine American history in the most bizarre ways makes this one of the most entertaining books you’ll read this year.

In an essay titled “Why the National Parks Were Set Aside,” Petri records the reasons she assumes some of our most famous landmarks were preserved: “Yellowstone: GEYSER SQUIRTS HUGE AMOUNTS OF WATER INTO AIR WITHOUT WARNING. . . . Zion: Seems steep. . . . Grand Canyon: Big hole in the ground without proper signage. Leave it as it is.” And in “John and Abigail Adams Try Sexting,” Petri imagines the Founding Father and his wife writing a series of racy (for the 1700s) letters while he is in Paris. “I am attired in a woolen gown and a cap of a stiff linen material, as well as five petticoats, my bustle, and my customary stays. I was wearing stockings, but I am not wearing them any longer,” Abigail writes. “I hope that soon you shall be wearing merely four!” John replies.

Hot stuff!

Petri’s previous book of essays, the excellent Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why, focused on current topics such as QAnon conspiracies and the Trump administration. This new collection feels somewhat sweeter and gentler, albeit still side-splittingly funny. It’s a satirical salve at a time when we need humor more than ever.

Alexandra Petri’s seemingly effortless ability to reimagine American history in the most bizarre ways makes this one of the most entertaining books you’ll read this year.
FictionLiterary Fiction

The Guest

Review by Amy Scribner

Alex has found herself alone, without a home and penniless on the wealthy East End of Long Island. She walks along aimlessly in the hot sun, everything she owns in a small bag. When a couple pedal past her on their beach cruisers, Alex wonders idly about their story: “What sort of day lay ahead of them? Some easy waste of the afternoon. What possible worries would they have?”

It wasn’t always like this for Alex. Just a week earlier, she was the summer houseguest of Simon, who showered Alex with expensive jewelry, luxurious clothes and a buttery soft purse. All Alex had to do in return was pretend to be a demure young woman contemplating grad school and conceal her true identity: a desperate escort hiding from an unhinged ex from whom she stole a significant amount of money and drugs. 

But as much as she tried to be a perfect guest, “every once in a while, Alex took one of Simon’s painkillers to stitch the looser hours together.” When she drinks too much at a party and jumps in the pool with the host’s much younger husband, Simon tells her it’s time for her to go. For the rest of this eerily heartbreaking novel, we follow Alex as she finds ways to survive until she can earn Simon’s forgiveness. 

Author Emma Cline’s bestselling, award-winning debut novel, The Girls, was based loosely on the story of the Manson family murders, and she followed it up with a popular story collection, Daddy. The Guest is a worthy and unforgettable next step for Cline, whose style is spare yet beautiful. And while her main character is deeply flawed, Cline treats Alex with a gentleness that makes her situation all the more striking.

On its surface, The Guest is about a lost soul, a drifter who has no plan and no safety net. But this deeply felt novel also raises provocative questions about how our society treats young women. How can Alex be virtually invisible, wandering through a wealthy beach town without garnering a single second glance? She is like a ghost—never settled, never seen.

The Guest is a worthy and unforgettable next step for Emma Cline, whose style is spare yet beautiful.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Majority

Review by Amy Scribner

There is no institution in the United States more powerful, more mysterious, more impenetrable than the Supreme Court. It’s rare when we get to see the nine sitting justices as mere mortals—whether in moments of horror and disappointment, such as the sexual misconduct case against Brett Kavanaugh, or in moments of levity, as when Ruth Bader Ginsburg dozed off during the 2015 State of the Union.

In Elizabeth L. Silver’s engrossing and thought-provoking novel The Majority, we meet Justice Sylvia Olin Bernstein, aka “the Contemptuous S.O.B.” A flinty and aging justice, she decides it’s time to tell her life story—messy relationships, heartbreak and all. While The Majority is a clear homage to Ginsburg, Silver (The Execution of Noa P. Singleton) paints a full portrait of Sylvia, whose life unfolds during some of the most consequential events in American history. 

Sylvia’s mother dies when she is young, leaving her in a loving but bleak home in New York with her devout Jewish father and a cousin who fled the Nazis after her entire family was killed. Sylvia gets her chance to move on when she’s one of only nine women admitted in 1959 to Harvard Law School. With her vast intelligence and force of will, Sylvia ascends to the highest levels of the United States legal system.

As is so often the case for trailblazers, her success comes with significant sacrifice, both personally and professionally. When she takes on a landmark case involving a woman who lost her job when she became pregnant, Sylvia realizes she has been preparing for this case for most of her life. “My mother told me when I was twelve years old that we—women—were close to being the larger group in America,” she tells the plaintiff. “Well, now women are the majority, and yet we hold almost no power at all. In some small way, perhaps this is a slight chiseling away at that. And if successful, it’s a legacy you can pass on to more than [your child]. It’s a legacy to pass on to an entire country.”

The Majority is more than an entertaining read, although it is certainly that. It’s a profound contemplation of how women are treated by the law and how they administer the law. The Contemptuous S.O.B. is both a brilliant jurist and an all-too-human woman fighting against a system stacked against her. 

While The Majority is a clear homage to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elizabeth L. Silver paints a full portrait of Sylvia, whose life unfolds during some of the most consequential events in American history.
FictionComing of Age

Idlewild

Review by Amy Scribner

“For my first two years at Idlewild, I had no friends. I didn’t mind it much. I appreciated that no one paid attention to me, that I could move through the school unnoticed.” This is how we meet Nell Rifkin, a public school transfer on scholarship to the titular posh Quaker high school in Manhattan. Idlewild is the kind of place where wealth runs deep and silent: “Flaunting your wealth went against Quaker ideals, plus Idlewild parents tended to be shabby-chic trust fund artists, so it was often hard to tell who was really rich.”

Nell eventually befriends Fay Vasquez-Rabinowitz, a “lifer” who has been at the school since kindergarten. On 9/11, they form a bond when Fay has nowhere to go while waiting for her artist parents to answer the phone. The two become F&N, an inseparable, sarcastic duo.

F&N are into school theater and making fun of their peers. Nell is also into Fay, and although Fay suspects as much, it’s an unspoken part of their friendship. “For a year and a half, my brain merged into hers until I had no idea where she ended and I began,” Nell says. F&N befriend Theo and Christopher, fellow students who seem to have a similar kind of friendship. A lot of what they do is typical teenage stuff: They party a little and ditch school to eat waffles at the diner near campus. But then the friendships turn dark. Using the nascent medium of internet journals, the four try to dazzle each other with their cleverness, with predictably awful results.

James Frankie Thomas’ first novel, Idlewild, is a fever dream of a book, full of longing, regret and hormones. It’s reminiscent of such coming-of-age classics as Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep and Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides yet also wholly original. Chapters shift between Nell’s and Fay’s perspectives, both as estranged adults looking back on their Idlewild years, and as F&N in 2002. Nell is especially compelling as a queer, extremely smart teenager who doesn’t try to hide anything about who she is.

Set against the backdrop of a post-9/11 nation on the verge of war, Idlewild is about the consequences of choices, big and small.

James Frankie Thomas’ first novel is a fever dream of a book, full of longing, regret and hormones.

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