Misconception
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Former sweethearts revisit their teenage love—and their conflicting memories of the past—in this “gem of a first novel” (Charles Bock, author of Beautiful Children).
In between business in Iceland and home in Silicon Valley, Cedar Rivers has come to Albany, New York, to meet a woman he hasn’t seen in twenty years. When he knew her, Kat was a cute proto-Goth with chipped black nail polish. Now she’s a literary up-and-comer who has summoned him to vet her new memoir—an account of the summer they were sweethearts. And she’s written parts of it from his point of view.
Through an intense weekend in a snowed-in motel room, Cedar and Kat relive their most painful memories: Before they had a chance at first love, Kat was dragged off on a family sailing trip by her mother and her mother’s new fiancé. Kat returned with a secret, one which—when she shared it with Cedar—set off a series of miscalculated assumptions that snowballed into a startlingly tragic incident.
A tender, absurd, and heartbreaking novel about the unintended consequences of first love and bad judgment, Misconception slyly questions the way we narrate our memories and assign culpability.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A breezy, humorous first novel from Boudinot (after his collection, The Littlest Hitler) chronicles the awkward coming-of-age of a boy whose middle-school crush entwines him into the girl's dysfunctional family. Cedar Rivers is first introduced when he brings in his own semen for inspection under the microscope in eighth-grade science class, a stunt that impresses incipient beauty Kat Daniels. Groping summer sexual experiments ensue and are cut short as Kat has to spend a month traveling with her mom and her mom's creepy new boyfriend, George. When Kat returns pregnant, George is the assumed suspect. Boudinot is not overly concerned by this flimsy plot, managing to inject textual interest by alternating the narrative in the voices of first Cedar then Kat, whom Cedar meets with 20 years later to sign a waiver regarding the memoir she's about to publish. There are ironic, tongue-in-cheek moments ("Ryan Boudinot" is the name of a critic who reviewed Kat's first book), perhaps to remind the reader not to take any of this too seriously especially the over-the-top ending while Boudinot provides moments of gossamer prose.
