The Falconer
-
-
4.3 • 3 Ratings
-
-
- $10.99
Publisher Description
An iBooks Book of the Year 2019: 'Our favourite debut ... a glorious, empowering, coming of age NY story.'
'An electric debut' New York Times
'Exhilarating' Claire Messud
'Deeply affecting' Salman Rushdie
Seventeen-year-old Lucy Adler, a street-smart, trash-talking baller, is often the only girl on the public courts. Lucy's inner life is a contradiction. She's by turns quixotic and cynical, insecure and self-possessed and, despite herself, is in unrequited love with her best friend and pick-up teammate Percy, son of a prominent New York family who is trying to resist his upper crust fate.
As Lucy questions accepted notions of success, bristling against her own hunger for male approval, she is drawn into the world of a pair of provocative female artists living in what remains of New York's bohemia.
In her hit US debut, Dana Czapnik memorably captures the voice of a young woman in the first flush of freedom searching for an authentic way to live and love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her flawed first novel, Czapnik recreates the New York City of 1993 as seen through the eyes of Lucy Adler, an Upper West Side high school student who lives for basketball. Lucy is a member of her school's girls' basketball team and also plays pickup games in Riverside Park where she is often the sole girl on the court with her wealthy friend, Percy Abney, who seems oblivious to the fact that Lucy is in love with him. Also playing major roles in Lucy's life are her best friend and teammate, Alexis Feliz, and two downtown female artists, Violet and Max, who share an apartment in SoHo and impart to Lucy important lessons about life, love, and art. Lucy spends most of the book wandering around Manhattan, giving her story a plotless feel. And Lucy and her friends sound way too mature and savvy for their teenage years. (Lucy, for instance, describes a character having a beard "that belongs on a Hasidic rabbi from Warsaw circa 1934.") Despite a lived-in sense of place, this coming-of-age novel seems to be about jaded young characters who have already come of age, leaving them and the reader with little room for emotional development.
