Hi! I’m back!
Thanks for your patience as I spent the last few months opening Wonderland Books. It has been an exhilarating, intense, rewarding and exhausting stretch, but I am finally getting my footing. Ironically, I haven’t had much time for reading, but I have read a few books over the last two months or so, and I am going to try to get back to reviewing them here.
I’ll start with A Gorgeous Excitement by Cynthia Weiner, a coming-of-age novel that takes place over the summer of 1986 in New York City. Nina Jacobs has just graduated high school and is determined to head off to college in the fall having finally slept with a boy. She spends her nights at a bar on the Upper East Side with WASPy teenagers fueled by alcohol and cocaine (which was nicknamed “a gorgeous excitement” by another author), while also contending with a mentally ill mother, toxic friendships, and menacing strangers in a shadowy, dangerous Central Park, including the (real-life) Preppy Murderer who killed a teenager that summer.
This is a slow-burn, nostalgia-drenched look at a girl contending with serious family problems while trying to become the person she wants to be in the world. I loved all the 80s details – boy did they take me back – and felt for Nina, who was basically on her own while contending with some very weighty and confusing things. Weiner’s writing is eloquent and detailed, and Nina is utterly relatable. I listened to A Gorgeous Excitement on audio, narrated by Rebecca Lowman, who infused the book with a tension and urgency that matched Nina’s often manic state that summer.