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Critics' Opinion:
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Published:
Jan 2019, 288 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Lisa Butts
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Told in vibrant, quicksilver prose, The Falconer is a coming-of-age story, providing a snapshot of the city and America through the eyes of the children of the baby boomers grappling with privilege and the fading of radical hopes.
New York, 1993. Seventeen-year-old Lucy Adler, a street-smart, trash-talking baller, is often the only girl on the public courts. At turns quixotic and cynical, insecure and self-possessed, Lucy is in unrequited love with her best friend and pick-up teammate Percy, scion to a prominent New York family who insists he wishes to resist upper crust fate.
As she navigates this complex relationship with all its youthful heartache, Lucy is seduced by a different kind of life - one less consumed by conventional success and the approval of men. A pair of provocative female artists living in what remains of New York's bohemia invite her into their world, but soon even their paradise begins to show cracks.
Excerpt
The Falconer
The ball is a face. Leathered and weathered and pockmarked and laugh lined. No, it's not a face. It's a big round world, with crevices and ravines slithering across tectonic plates. I bounce the world hard on the blacktop, and it comes back into my hand covered with a fine layer of New York City diamond dust—pavement shards, glass, crystallized exhaust from the West Side Highway—and it feels like a man's stubble, or what I imagine stubble might feel like against my palm, and it's a face again. I bounce the face, and it's back in my hand and it's something else. A sun. A red terrestrial planet. An equidimensional spheroid made of cowhide and filled with nitrogen and oxygen. Whatever it is, whatever I imagine it to be, I know it holds some kind of magical power.
There's Percy on my periphery. Limbs like a wind chime in a hurricane. He's open in the passing lane. Woo woos for the ball. But I got this. I've had the touch all game. I'm dribbling the sun nice...
The Falconer is an instant female coming-of-age classic replete with 1990s nostalgia; equal parts cinematic and contemplative, cynical and doggedly hopeful. Dana Czapnik's protagonist will undoubtedly draw comparisons to Holden Caulfield, the archetype of teenage misanthropy, but she is so much more than that — a completely original and exceptional creation.
(Reviewed by Lisa Butts).
Full Review
(680 words).
Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl and The Woman Upstairs
Smart, tough, an extraordinary athlete, Lucy Adler teeters, zealous and baffled, on the cusp of womanhood. Dana Czapnik's frank heroine has a voice, and a perspective, you won't soon forget. The Falconer is an exhilarating debut. Salman Rushdie, author of The Golden House and Midnight's Children
A deeply affecting tale of a young woman coming of age in a man's world. All the characters feel authentic and unique, and its protagonist, Lucy Adler, jumps right off the page...Lucy's journey into adulthood will be especially resonant with today's readers. Colum McCann, author of Thirteen Ways of Looking and Let The Great World Spin Chloe Benjamin, author of The Immortalists and The Anatomy of Dreams
Meet Lucy Adler. As I read The Falconer, I felt like I'd found a literary cousin of Holden Caulfield - if Holden were a straight-shooting, hip-hop-listening, court-dominating, seventeen-year-old Jewish-Italian girl. Dana Czapnik has crafted a wholly original coming-of-age story. In basketball terms, The Falconer is a fearless three-point shot. Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances and American Innovations
Told with a poet's ear and a basketball player's eye and reflexes, The Falconer is an extraordinary book...Every detail feels true and important, every small observation tells a larger story. A wonderful new talent.Lucy Adler, the teenage protagonist in The Falconer, is influenced by her older cousin, Violet, a painter and feminist who provides a model of independent womanhood (albeit an imperfect one). In one scene, Violet takes Lucy to a bookstore and buys her copies of French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir's seminal texts, The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex.
Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908 and exhibited a brilliant and creative mind from an early age. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, becoming only the ninth woman to graduate from the college, which had only recently begun admitting women. She met Jean Paul Sartre there, and the two began their lifelong personal and professional collaboration. They were romantically...
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