The Lightness

Emily Temple’s “elegant and entertaining” debut combines magic, satire, mystery, and heartbreak, said Patrick Rapa in The Philadelphia Inquirer. It begins as a coming-of-age story with a 16-year-old fleeing home to enroll at a Buddhist summer camp on a mountaintop somewhere in America that is also the place her father was last seen. The camp tends to be a parking place for wealthy families’ misbehaving daughters, and Olivia quickly befriends a few who are determined to learn whether the legend is true that says the mountain enables certain select individuals to levitate. “Almost from the outset, the narrator floats just over the reader’s shoulder, warning us that no good will come of this,” said Leslie Pariseau in the Los Angeles Times. And some readers will be bored by the digressions and narrative experiments that I liked most. Either way, ambition is “a promising quality in a debut novelist.” Ultimately, we discover, it wasn’t a missing parent or the ability to float that spurred Olivia on. It was, instead, “the desire to find something beyond herself, beyond the self.”