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Summary
Summary
Nanette O'Hare is an unassuming teen who has played the role of dutiful daughter, hardworking student, and star athlete for as long as she can remember. But when a beloved teacher gives her his worn copy of The Bubblegum Reaper --a mysterious, out-of-print cult classic--the rebel within Nanette awakens.
As she befriends the reclusive author, falls in love with a young but troubled poet, and attempts to insert her true self into the world with wild abandon, Nanette learns the hard way that rebellion sometimes comes at a high price.
A celebration of the self and the formidable power of story, Every Exquisite Thing is Matthew Quick at his finest.
Author Notes
Matthew Quick graduated with a double-majored in English and secondary education from La Salle University in 1996. He taught literature and film at Haddonfield Memorial High School in New Jersey for several years, before leaving in 2004 to become a fiction writer. He received his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Goddard College in 2007. He writes for young adults and adults. His young adult books include Sorta Like a Rock Star, Boy21, and Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock. His adult books include The Silver Linings Playbook, which was made into an Oscar-winning film, and The Good Luck of Right Now.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this coming-of-age story, teenager Nanette O'Hare is transformed from conformist to rebel when she reads an out-of-print novel that stresses personal authenticity. With some of her subsequent choices-falling in love with a troubled fellow fan of the book, quitting sports, and refusing to feign interest in her peers' shallow preoccupations-she discovers the joy of genuine freedom but also the difficult lesson that "you must sometimes pay a high price for individuality." Johansson is an experienced narrator and voice actress who has performed dozens of audio books, including murder mysteries, middle-grade fiction, and romance. Many of the characters speak with a New Jersey accent, which Johansson nails, adding flavor to the story without sounding caricaturist. Her performance doesn't shy away from the raw emotions of first love and loss, but it stays in keeping with Nanette's generally circumspect and level emotional keel: this is a girl who holds things tightly to the chest. Johansson's narration makes this an engaging and thoughtful listen. Ages 15-up. A Little, Brown hardcover. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
Conventional high-school soccer star Nanettes life changes irrevocably after shes given The Bubblegum Reaper, a classic cult novel about nonconformity, by her favorite teacher -- and especially after she befriends the books elderly author, Nigel Booker. Booker sets her up with fellow teen fan Alex, a poet with a troubled, violent past. As Alex and Nanette build a relationship around their mutual love of TBR and counterculture literature, Nanette rejects everything expected of her, including soccer, friendships, and college plans. Alexs response to the books radical spirit is more extreme, leading to tragic mistakes that show Nanette the hazards of rebellion (and partly explain why Booker has always seemed ashamed of his only novel). This is an ode to revolutionary literature -- its power to inspire change and incite action (positive and otherwise). Its also an engaging bildungsroman as Nanette comes into her own and realizes that adults, even cult hero Booker, dont know it all. Quicks story will speak to teenage eccentrics: loners, rebels, and creative types; the kind to follow Bookers suggestions to read Bukowski and Neruda; those ripe for transformation. But Quick also warns against looking for all the answers in the pages of a book, for literature "made sense only in theoretical situations and didnt often help in real life, where it took a hell of a lot more courage to live than to turn pages all alone." katrina hedeen (c) Copyright 2016. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
Nanette is by most accounts a success: she does well in school, has popular friends, is a brilliant soccer player, and already has college recruiters knocking down her door. So why isn't she happy? When her favorite teacher gives her an out-of-print cult novel, The Bubblegum Reaper, the answer starts to shake loose. Fixated on the novel's enigmatic message of quitting Life? School? Convention? she seeks out the author, who eventually introduces her to Alex, another lover of the novel. Together, they puzzle over the novel's mysteries until their friendship builds to a touching romance. But when Alex starts taking the novel's message too far, Nanette starts to see the harm in taking an intransigent stand. Quick creates beautifully well-rounded characters, particularly Nanette, whose first-person narrative, rich with wry observations and a kaleidoscope of meaningful emotions, offers great insight into the mind of a teen on a sometimes-sluggish, spiraling path toward sorting herself out. In the end, Nanette finds there are no easy answers, and maybe none at all, but that's perhaps the most powerful lesson.--Hunter, Sarah Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
CERTAIN GROWN-UPS REVEL in dumb generalizations about young adult literature. They say that Y.A. lacks moral ambiguity; that it is too dark; that it doesn't depict empowered female sexuality; that it is populated by fields of sparkly vampires; that it sprang fully formed from the head of John Green. Nice try, reductive grown-ups. The only overarching thing that characterizes young adult literature is the age of the protagonist. Y.A. is sometimes fluffy, sometimes fanged, sometimes hot, sometimes cool. Its writers' voices are punk rock and hip-hop and symphonic and fizzy-poppy. As these summer fiction possibilities prove, Y.A. books can be as different from one another as Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin is from Blind Lemon Jefferson. Let's start our "there are more things in heaven and earth" exploration with EVERY EXQUISITE THING (Little, Brown, $17.99), by Matthew Quick, the author of "The Silver Linings Playbook." It's about Nanette, a high school junior whose suburban, conformist life is blown wide open after she reads an out-of-print coming-of-age novel called "The Bubblegum Reaper." Soon she's hanging out with its reclusive author, Nigel Booker, and a teenage boy named Alex who's a fellow Booker acolyte. Nanette starts reading Bukowski and Philip Larkin, rebelling against her shallow parents, tossing away her soccer stardom because she has come to hate the game, and falling in love. But before long her life starts sliding out of control. "Every Exquisite Thing" is guilty of the "not like other girls" trope - the notion that while most girls are predictable and icky, this one has complex dreams and emotions that make her special. And since the other girls in "Every Exquisite Thing" are vapid, undifferentiated, peach-schnapps-swilling sexpots, no wonder Nanette is a singular creation who'd rather hang with dudes who tell her to read dude authors. The plots of "Every Exquisite Thing" and "The Bubblegum Reaper" parallel each other; both are about ambiguity and not being able to look to adults or convention for guidance on how to live a meaningful life. But Quick sometimes seems to mock Nanette's pain and pretensions in away that feels meanspirited. "I like listening to music and reading poetry and novels," she tells her friend Shannon. "I like seeing art house films. I like having philosophical discussions as I look up at a hunter's moon." Shannon replies, "Maybe you're just a snob, Nanette." Maybe she is. But the universe Quick has built for her doesn't offer an alternative. By the time I finished reading "Every Exquisite Thing" (the title is from "The Picture of Dorian Gray": "Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic"), my shoulders were somewhere around my upper ears. AS I read SCARLETT EPSTEIN HATES IT HERE (Razorbill/Penguin, $17.99), by Anna Breslaw, they inched back down. Scarlett has female friends who are smart and kind. She's a writer of fan fiction, so she doesn't treat canonical texts as gospel. Her stories are rooted in a "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"-esque TV show about a boarding school in which half the students are werewolves. But after the show ends, she begins a new narrative based on the lives of her friends, her nemeses and her crush object, Gideon. Unlike Nanette, Scarlett is self-aware and mouthy, snarkily alert to the class divide in her suburban New Jersey town, where her family can't afford all the extras her classmates take for granted and she is used to being made fun of "for wearing thrift-store clothes (they weren't cool yet), bringing weird wholesale Sam's Club chocolate milk to lunch unlike everybody else's normal Nesquiks, and the million other tiny indicators kids can sniff out poorness with." She adores her best friend, Ave, but wishes Ave were more assertive. "If Ave had invented fire, she'd introduce it to the Cro-Magnons by whispering, 'Um, hey, I made this thing, it's kinda cool, it might be sorta helpful for our continued evolution, if that makes any sense.'" Scarlett is annoyed at herself for her crush on Gideon, who acts like a jerk with the popular boys instead of living his best life as the stand-up-comedy nerd he is in his soul. When Scarlett sees him in school the day after he and his posse have trashed her feminist, pot-smoking neighbor's garden, she has no idea what to say. "I freeze helplessly, torn between wanting to yell at him about his cisgender white male sense of entitlement and whisper to him that he smells like pine needles and dreams." Relatable. Alas, many of Scarlett's references don't sound very kidlike ("Glengarry Glen Ross"? "The Wire"? Reclaimed-wood tables? Flipping through Redbook in a waiting room?), and the plot is, to be charitable, shaky. A character dies solely to advance the protagonist's emotional arc. Feh. But Scarlett's goofy, cranky voice is fun nonetheless. Her story is writ small. THE SERPENT KING (Crown, $17.99), a debut by Jeff Zentner, on the other hand, is an ambitious, sui generis genre mash-up. The three main characters, who live in rural Tennessee, seem to come from three kinds of literature: Dill, with his snake-handling fundamentalist preacher father - currently incarcerated for possession of child pornography - and fearful, quietly manipulative mother, is straight out of Southern Gothic. His parents don't want him to go to college (his mother wants him to drop out of high school and make money), and with his soulful guitar playing, self-doubt and yearning, you ache for him to find his way into a different story. Lydia is a smart-mouthed fashionista and power blogger whose spiky voice is so well executed she could text with Scarlett. Travis is a lumbering, black-clad, dragon-pendant-wearing, staff-carrying guy who lives through his passion for a George R. R. Martin-style fantasy world. Zentner's great achievement - particularly impressive for a first novel - is to make us believe three such different people could be friends. He also manages to blend a dank, oppressive, Flannery O'Connor-esque sense of place with humor and optimism. I particularly looked forward to Travis's passionate narration as he pretends he's in the "Game of Thrones"-like world. (Having dinner at Lydia's well-stocked house, he composes in his head: "The harvest was good that year in Raynar Northbrook's lands, and they feasted often on the heavy oaken table that sat in his great hall. He called for bread and meat until he was sated.") The characters narrate their own chapters, which makes for some wild shifts in tone. The unredeemable monstrousness of Dill's and Travis's fathers may prove hard for some readers to take, and a senseless, drug-fueled tragedy may seem over the top. But I adored all three of these characters and the way they talked to and loved one another. Mariko Tamaki's SAVING MONTGOMERY SOLE (Roaring Brook, $17.99) is also about three friends, but it's far less wrenching to read. Montgomery and her friends Naoki and Thomas constitute the Jefferson High Mystery Club in Aunty, Calif. They hang out after school and discuss strange phenomena. One day Monty spots an online ad for the "Eye of Know," a mystical crystal amulet from an actual meteorite, on sale for only $5.99. She buys it, and unnerving things start to happen. The book's vivid California-ness - avocado trees and warm air and concrete - along with Thomas's out-and-proud gayness ("Remember we are orchids in a forest of carnations," he texts) and Naoki's sparkly air-sprite energy reminded me a bit of Francesca Lia Block's classic '90s Y.A. novel "Weetzie Bat." But Monty's voice is far more sardonic than Weetzie's. "The sky was that pulsing electric blue that it is here," she writes. "It's this unforgettable, I'm-so-blue-it-hurts blue that I've always found kind of ridiculous. It's blue like nail polish for club kids. Anyway, today I wasn't really minding it." "Saving Montgomery Sole" has the assured tone and meandering plot of Tamaki's strange and lovely graphic novel "This One Summer" (illustrated by Jillian Tamaki, who is her cousin and the illustrator of the Book Review's By the Book feature). Both books deal with inchoate rage and anxiety. Monty loves her two moms and her friends, but the presence of a homophobic right-wing preacher in town has her on edge, and being surrounded by teenagers who aren't as enlightened as her immediate circle makes her furious. "I could feel my brain filling up with angry bits, piling up like Ho Ho wrappers on a binge day," she says. "Like homework on a Sunday." There's no big revelation, no epiphany. The mystery of the amulet is never solved. Readers who find this maddening are not the right readers for this book. Readers who do not like human effluvia are not the right readers for THE HATERS (Amulet Books, $18.95). I must impress upon you how profane, vile and hilarious this book is. I laughed so hard I scared my cat off the couch multiple times, but if you have ever used the phrase "the coarsening of discourse," it is not for you. It's by Jesse Andrews, the author of "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl," which also had gross moments, but not this gross, and there was a dying girl, so the gross seemed in service of something noble. Not this time. "The Haters" is about Wes, Corey and Ash, who meet at jazz camp, start a band and flee on a long and filthy road trip. The depiction of jazz camp - with its hypercompetitive, fedora-wearing, skinny white guys trying to talk like Miles Davis - slays. One guy starts chatting up Wes, who was adopted from Venezuela, and when Wes asks him to stop talking like that, he says: "'Well, this is how I talk with the brothers back in South Philly. And they've never had a problem with it. But if you have a problem, man. ...' He nodded slowly. 'Then I got to thank you,' he said. 'For speaking your truth.'" It's clear why our heroes have to escape jazz camp. The three play in dives and eat junk food (the beef-flavored chips "had a taste that I would categorize as like a locker room, but for dogs") and sleep wherever they can ("Motel 6 is where you go if you've been evicted from your home and you need a place to do the meth that you just stole from the corpse of a prostitute," Ash pronounces) and meet lovely and scary people and have romantic interludes. What "The Haters" excels at is describing music. Here's how Andrews captures terrible improv jazz: "The trombones were botching goofball quotations like 'Flight of the Bumble-bee' and then signaling surrender with sheepish atonal elephant noises. And each of the saxophone solos was basically the equivalent of the small talk that you are forced to make with the friend of your mom who cuts your hair." And, helpfully for many readers, "if you don't know music, just know that if the band is playing in F but you're playing in E, it's going to sound simultaneously very whimsical and very horrible. It's basically a horror movie starring the Muppets." What "The Haters" does not excel at is girls. Ash is, shall we say, a poorly developed character. And there's a scene in which she is uncomfortably in the room while a comic-relief white hippie girl has several rounds of sex with a semiconscious Wes. (In the morning, when Wes is sober, Ash tells him, "You were just lying there murmuring, Please, no, and she was ordering you around in broken Spanish.") Not funny. But a lot in the book is. From the gross to the celestial: THE SQUARE ROOT OF SUMMER (Roaring Brook, $17.99), a debut by Harriet Reuter Hapgood, is a story of love and grief grounded in physics. Gottie Oppenheimer is a math and science genius in a small seaside town in Norfolk, England. Her mom died when she was born; now she's mourning her grandfather Grey's unexpected death. Her best friend, Thomas, who moved to Canada five years earlier, is coming back. She has strange gaps in her memory. And she starts experiencing disruptions in time and space. This is a novel for readers unafraid of science. There's talk of fractals, wormholes, black holes, the Gödel metric ("a solution to the E=MC^sup 2^ equation that 'proves' the past still exists"), Schrödinger's cat, string theory. Physics provides metaphors for loss, confusion and love. But there's humor, too, including terrible band names (Gottie's brother is a glam rocker) worthy of "The Haters": Fingerband, Synthmoan de Beauvoir, Jurassic Parkas. There are funny German words and delicious baked goods and crazy outfits. And Thomas is wonderful. When he tells Gottie how sorry he is about Grey's death, "it's the first time someone's hugged me since Oma and Opa, at Christmas. I stand there, made out of elbows. ... But after a moment, I wrap myself around him. It's a hug like warm cinnamon cake, and I sink into it." Later: "His kiss interrupts me, sudden-short-sweet. Unquestionable. It feels like reading a favorite book, and falling for the ending even though you already know what happens." The book is too long and has entirely too many physics analogies. But the delectable romance and the moment when past, present and future all come together and semi-solve the mysteries of Gottie's time travel make the journey worthwhile. Nothing about Julie Berry's THE PASSION OF DOLSSA (Viking, $18.99) should work. It is a 500-page book set in the 13th century, sprinkled with a medieval language called Old Provençal, about a young noblewoman who escapes a Dominican order that wants to burn her as a heretic. Yet I stayed up all night reading it and had tears in my eyes almost the entire time. Dolssa is an 18-year-old girl who has a Song of Songs-like relationship with God. "He caught me up on wings of light, and showed me the realms of his creation, the glittering gemstones paving his heaven," she says. "He left my body weak and spent, my spirit gorged with honey." The friars do not look kindly on this kind of talk. But Dolssa (miraculously?) escapes being thrown into the flames and winds up in the seaside village of Bajas. There she's cared for by three sisters who run a tavern and supplement their income by whoring (the oldest), fortunetelling (the youngest) and matchmaking (the middle sister). It turns out Dolssa can perform healing miracles. But an obsessed friar is tracking her through the countryside with near-sexual fixation, interviewing prostitutes as well as Jews and small-town clergymen about whether they've seen her. The language is gorgeous and evocative without seeming to try too hard. You practically smell the sea and taste the foamy ale. The characters have clearly differentiated voices; Dolssa sounds fancy and stilted for much of the book, while the sisters sound like the funny, earthy wenches they are. I cried partly because of the matter-of-fact kindness of the sisters - they care for others because it's the moral thing to do - and partly because of the parallels to our country now. There's a difference between being Christ-like and using Christ's name to oppress others, to silence women and persecute immigrants. I'm not sure how big an audience there is for a book like this. But I found it magnificent. Finally, we turn to another debut, THE STAR-TOUCHED QUEEN (St. Martin's Griffin, $18.99), by Roshani Chokshi, a fantasy drenched in Indian folklore. It's essentially a fairy tale, with a journey, an evil villain, minimal characterization and a happy ending. But lush, ornate ribbons of language are festooned over the bones of story, turning it into something rich and dizzying. Maya, a princess in Bharata, is rescued by a mysterious man named Amar. He smells of "mint and smoke, cardamom and wood." He can't tell Maya who he is until the new moon, but he's obviously trustworthy, because he says things like "I want to lie beside you and know the weight of your dreams." He tells her, "Come with me and you shall be an empress with the moon for your throne and constellations to wear in your hair." My teenage-demigoth self would have swooned. Amar and Maya ride through magical settings to his empty castle. Mirrors reflect "countries spiked with spires, turrets bursting with small ivy flowers, cities awash in color, and a thousand skies painted in vespertine violets of anxious nightfall waiting for stars, dawns just barely blooming pink and orange with new light, afternoons presiding over sleeping towns. ... It was all here." You either have to let yourself be swept along or wind up doing an Amazon search to find out how many times the word "glittering" appears. (Fifteen.) I was troubled by grammatical errors: "Girl that" rather than "girl who; "with myself" rather than "with me"; "He sunk beneath the water." But who cares, if you're a reader who imagines being bathed in milk, adorned with amethysts and kissed by a gorgeous stranger who says: "I know your soul. Everything else is an ornament." MARJORIE INGALL is a columnist at Tablet and the author of the forthcoming nonfiction book "Mamaleh Knows Best."
School Library Journal Review
Gr 10 Up-By all rights, Nanette O'Hare should be popular; she's pretty, stylish, and the star of the girls' soccer team. However, she couldn't care less about being popular; she's happiest reading her favorite book, The Bubblegum Reaper, and hanging out with her only real friend, the elderly author of that novel. The out-of-print cult classic brings out Nanette's inner rebel, and she starts to enjoy life instead of just coasting by, especially when she is set up on a blind date with another Bubblegum Reaper fan, a troubled poet named Little Lex, and they learn that they may have to pay a higher price for their teenage rebellion than what they bargained for. Narrated beautifully by Vanessa Johansson, who brings a youthful voice to this coming-of-age novel. VERDICT A wonderful, heartbreaking, and inspiring listen. ["Quick's nuanced story of rebellion and its cost will appeal to fans of Stephen Chbosky and John Green": SLJ 3/16 starred review of the Little, Brown book.]-Erin Cataldi, Johnson County Public Library, Franklin, IN © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
