Author: Jennifer Graham

If starting (or restarting) an exercise program is one of your new year resolutions, Christopher McDougall can help you achieve it.

McDougall, a former war correspondent for the Associated Press, fell into a second career when he started writing about running. His 2011 book Born to Run had the effect of an incendiary device in the running community because it challenged the notion that runners need expensive shoes. Now he is back, with Eric Orton, for Born to Run 2.

Like the first book, which examined the athletic prowess of members of a tribe who can run for hundreds of miles without the accoutrement that most modern runners think they need, Born to Run 2 introduces us to some fascinating people, like a woman who was formerly 300 pounds but now runs regularly as a form of prayer. But this is essentially a training manual for regular people, especially people who have been told they can’t run, and people who find running tedious or hard.

McDougall argues that running is a natural state for the human body — “if it were difficult, we’d be extinct.” The earliest humans — for whom running was an occupation, not an interruption of the day — were able to survive in unforgiving circumstances not only because of their brains, but because they were able to run long distances. They weren’t faster than the animals they pursued, but since they could sweat and their prey couldn’t, they could outlast them by running until the animals collapsed. “Evolution doesn’t reward pain; it rewards joy,” the authors argue. For the modern human, “If it feels like work, you’re working too hard.”

Or running all wrong.

Most runners, even longtime ones, run wrong and in shoes that bring on injury. McDougall and Orton are particularly critical of the “squishy” shoes that are all the rage. While shoes that are padded and gel-packed may feel comfortable to stand in, they too much separate the foot from the ground, making our feet land unnaturally and preventing us from feeling the useful discomfort that should be the signal to run differently. They are equally disdainful of much common running advice:

“‘Listen to your body’ may be the only fitness advice more useless than ‘We are all an experiment of one.’ You and your body don’t speak the same language. You have no idea what each other is saying,” they write. “Your body still believes that on any given day it needs to run to find a mate, or fresh water, or a safe hideaway for the family before glowing eyes emerge from the dark.”

What advice does work? McDougall and Orton break it into seven fundamental steps: food, fitness, form, focus, footwear, fun and family. Yes, a cynic might say the sum total of the advice can be reduced to “eat less, exercise more,” but they offer counterintuitive, actionable steps to help us get to that point whether we are beginners or veteran exercisers who need a reboot.

For example, they point out that most runners focus on how they can run longer, not how they can run better (which would lead to running longer, and without injury). To run better, they maintain, takes all of 10 minutes to learn — in the comfort of your home, barefoot, with music. Your natural running form emerges when running in place, back to the wall, to songs set to a certain number of beats per minute — they recommend “Rock Lobster” by the B-52s, but they also offer other choices such as The Beatles’ “Help!” and Led Zeppelin’s “Rock & Roll.” Once you can feel how you’re supposed to run, it’s just a matter of practice out on the road or trail, they say.

They also promote a lifestyle full of what they call “movement snacks” — bite-sized stretches and movements throughout the day to keep us limber and emotionally in check. “The more you move, the more emotionally safe you’ll feel. The safer you feel, the happier and less anxious you’ll be.”

As for food, they advocate a diet heavy in sustainably sourced meat and cheese. “There is no ethical argument that can be made in support of commercial meat production,” they write, but with our carb- and sugar-rich diets today, our bodies have forgotten how to use fat as fuel, which is why so many people are obese. They prescribe a two-week “factory reset,” eating no foods that are high glycemic.

And of course, they take on running shoes, which they call “the most destructive force to ever hit the human foot.”

“If the Food and Drug Administration were in charge of running shoes, they’d be announcing a recall and yanking them off the shelves,” they write, citing a study that found people who ran in expensive running shoes bought after a gait analysis at a running-shoe store suffered five times as many injuries as people who hadn’t had that kind of “help.”

Minimalist shoes, however, had a short shelf life, and there’s little pleasure in running barefoot in New England in winter. There are some brands the authors recommend that can be ordered online, but at minimum, they recommend taking out the insole liners of your current shoes for immediate improvement. McDougall and Orton also offer advice on a number of other running topics, including best practices for running with dogs.

Some of their recommendations may be radical, but Born to Run 2 is engaging and for the most part convincing. It can be read without having read the first book, but for maximum inspiration, start with the first and proceed to the second. B+

Great Short Books: A Year of Reading — Briefly, by Kenneth C. Davis (Scribner, 448 pages)

In the early stages of the pandemic, Kenneth Davis grew tired of doomscrolling, but he wasn’t up for reading long books. As a compromise, he began to read a collection of tales set at the beginning of the Black Death in Florence, Italy, in the 14th century. It’s called Decameron, written by Giovanni Boccaccio, and its style is similar to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in that a character tells a different story each day.

Davis set about reading one of the novellas each day, which took him a little more than three months. After that, he decided to move on to short novels. Great Short Books is the culmination of this pandemic experience; it is Davis’s ode to the short novel, which he likens to a first date: “It can be extremely pleasant, even exciting, and memorable. Ideally, you leave wanting more. It can lead to greater possibilities. But there is no long-term commitment,” he writes.

Of the short novels he has read during the pandemic, Davis selected 58 to highlight in hopes that more readers will come to appreciate short fiction. Great Short Books contains the work of both famous and obscure writers from around the world; what they have in common, he says, is that they can be read in “one to several sittings” and “with careful rationing” we can read one each week. (With that, Davis reveals himself to not have small children under his care.) Generally, this means these books are anywhere from 100 to 200 pages, with some exceptions.

They aren’t just books he stumbled upon; he got recommendations from friends, librarians and people who work in publishing, and took care to make sure that the list wasn’t all from “dead white guys.” But Davis says that there was one standard that was nonnegotiable: to be included, the book had to be a pleasure to read. “I had … pledged that I would not read out of duty,” he writes.

The resulting titles include the work of George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Kate Chopin, Toni Morrison and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among other famous writers, as well as authors that would only be household names to people with multiple graduate degrees in literature. (Or maybe I’m just revealing my own ignorance by being unfamiliar with the work of Nadine Gordimer and Chinua Achebe.)

Each work gets its own chapter, set up with the opening sentences of the book. Perusing the openings of 58 lauded books is instructive in and of itself. (Some grab you at the start; others make you wonder why the eventual publisher even kept reading.)

From there, Davis composes his own CliffsNotes-type summary, promising no spoilers, then gives us a rundown on the author. He concludes each chapter with a bit of literary moralizing in a section called “Why you should read it,” and finishes with a summary of “What to read next.” For example, in the chapter on Orwell’s Animal Farm, he suggests we follow up with Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell’s three nonfiction books (Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia) as well as one of the author’s essays, “Politics and the English Language.”

For anyone who’s already a fan of Orwell, nee Eric Blair, there’s not much to be gained here; in fact, even Davis says that his advice to read or re-read Nineteen Eighty-Four is a “no-brainer.” But then again, this is not a highbrow book, nor does it pretend to be. Davis describes himself as the “common reader” that Virginia Woolf wrote about: “He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously” as a critic or scholar, she said. “He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others.”

Davis writes for people who find solace and camaraderie in books of all sorts, not necessarily those that win literary prizes. He advocates for reading outside of one’s comfort zone as a form of lifelong learning, no different from taking courses at a community college. And there’s no question that anyone who reads Great Short Books will come away with a list of a dozen or more on their “to-read” list. I’ve picked out a few just by virtue of their opening sentences. (July’s People by Nadine Gordimer and Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson.)

If there’s anything to quibble with here, it’s Davis’s argument that “Short novels are literature’s equivalent to the stand-up comedian Rodney Dangerfield’s signature line: they ‘get no respect.’” He says they “occupy the place of the neglected middle child of the literary world.” As an example, Davis says that critics dismissed Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach as too short (203 pages) to be a candidate for the Booker Prize in 2007. “So, a degree of critical prejudice — call it literary sizeism — exists against short fiction,” he concludes.

But does it really? Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These (128 pages) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize this year and won the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. One of the most beloved books of all time, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, is only about 31,000 words, roughly a third of the size of a typical novel.

And many books in the canon presented here argue against the author’s own words. Was there critical prejudice against Charlotte’s Web? A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? And the book we all forget existed prior to the movie: Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King?

That argument doesn’t hold up over centuries; in fact, with America’s famously shrinking attention span, it’s likely short books like these are our future. From the titles highlighted here, that’s not a bad thing. B+

Two Old Broads, by M.E. Hecht and Whoopi Goldberg (Harper Horizon, 222 pages)

There is no topic so grim that it can’t be lightened by humor. And with America seeming to be graying at light speed, a wickedly funny book on the subject of aging by comedian Whoopi Goldberg (co-written with a physician friend) seemed just the prescription, promising to reveal “stuff you need to know that you didn’t know you needed to know.”

Unfortunately, Two Old Broads does not deliver on its promise and more realistically could have been titled “Two Old Broads Stating the Obvious in a Vanity Book.” It’s that bad.

It’s hard to see how this collection of platitudes and painfully useless advice made it through an agent, let alone a major publishing house. It’s the sort of book that is usually self-published and foisted onto friends, who have to invent creative ways to praise the book without selling their soul. Worse, this yawner comes from accomplished women who should have more interesting things to say.

Mary Ellen Hecht was an orthopedic surgeon with degrees from Columbia and Yale, who died at age 93 just before the book’s publication. She had been friends with Whoopi Goldberg since they met at a fashion show in 2010. Goldberg, of course, is a talented comedian and actress who has won a Grammy, an Oscar, an Emmy, a Tony and a Golden Globe award.

With Goldberg at the shallow end of the aging pool at age 64, and Hecht at the deep end, the friends decided to share their collective advice on various aspects of aging, from skin care to exercise, from medication to wills, from sex over 60 to being “crochety with charm.” All of this is done under the “old broad” rubric, (e.g., “dress like a broad’) which gets tired after the second page.

Here is a sampling of some of their advice:

“Arthritis is a killer when it comes to style, but lift up your head, look the world in the eye, and say internally, Ready or not, here I come — someone to notice and admire!”

“Believe it or not, sweaty feet are an invitation to medical problems including fungal infections.”

“Under normal circumstances, it’s a good idea to get a second opinion.”

“Try not to go through your day with anything that causes discomfort, like a dress or slacks being too tight or shoes that cause pinching.”

Lines like this are not only boring, but they are actually insulting to readers, as if Hecht and Goldberg are speaking to geriatric kindergarteners unable to comprehend basic aspects of life. Is there an 80-year-old alive today that doesn’t know they should get second opinions on serious medical matters? Is there a 70-year-old alive who doesn’t know that if pants or shoes hurt, they should take them off?

The book disappoints, not only because it’s not remotely funny or wise, but also because it skips lightly over things that aging people care a lot about — skin care, for example. For that matter, it’s hard to find a person over 40 who isn’t concerned about how their face will look as they age (hence the trend of people in their 20s getting Botox). Yet on the subject of “senior skin care,” Hecht and Goldberg offer a total of three pages. Three pages in which readers are told they should drink water, apply face cream and wax facial hair — and are given a mind-numbingly juvenile pep talk: “ … Remember you’re the CEO of your own body! So behave like one!’

To be fair, it is possible, not being in my 80s or 90s, that I’m bringing the jaundiced eye of (relative) youth to the book. Maybe our elderly relatives and friends who have been living in caves for the past 40 years will benefit from the simplistic style. And yes, there are a few takeaways that might be helpful for people struggling with the indignities of old age, such as the authors’ “three-look method” of avoiding falls and accidents (look low, look level, look up) and there’s surely a benefit (though this could be intuited) to their advice to thoroughly stretch before getting out bed at any age.

Moreover, Hecht, who wrote most of the book, with Goldberg chiming in, throws out the occasional charming tidbit in musings on her life. I will not soon forget her Aunt Grace, a gourmet cook who, late in life, always ate dessert before the main course. (“For her, all food led to dessert,” Hecht writes.) As a fellow dessert fiend, I grudgingly enjoyed that story.

But the rare paragraphs that weren’t insulting (“I’m sure you are familiar with a well-known saying: ‘You are what you eat.’”), aren’t good enough to justify this use of your time.

There are genuinely funny books about aging (Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck comes to mind) and inspirational books about old women (Two Old Women by Velma Wallace). Two Old Broads offers little to recommend it other than the fame of one of the authors. Don’t gift it to anyone that you like. D

A Christmas Memory, by Richard Paul Evans (Gallery, 183 pages)

Thirty years ago, Richard Paul Evans was 29 years old and working for an advertising agency in Salt Lake City when he decided he’d try his hand at writing a book. He didn’t have a Haruki Murakami moment, when he suddenly knew he could be a novelist while sitting in a baseball park; rather, he had just run for a statewide political office and lost, and needed a new goal to fill the void.

In his spare time he spent four weeks writing a novella he called The Christmas Box and then made 27 copies at Kinko’s and gave them out as Christmas gifts. Family and friends loved the story, which was about a young couple who become caretakers for a widow who has a mysterious box full of letters that (spoiler alert) turn out to be life-changing for the man and his wife. A couple of publisher rejection letters later, Evans self-published the book and eventually it hit No. 2 on The New York Times self-published bestseller list. Shortly thereafter, it sold at auction to Simon & Schuster for $4.2 million. It wasn’t a bad investment.

Evans has gone on to write more than 40 novels, most of them bestsellers, many of which have something to do with Christmas. His latest is A Christmas Memory, which steals a title from Truman Capote. (Disclosure: Capote’s poignant reflection about making fruitcake with his elderly cousin was published in 1956 and is a staple in my annual holiday reading.) Capote, the author of In Cold Blood, would no doubt be amused that two writers with such different trajectories and styles converged in this way.

Like Capote’s A Christmas Memory, Evans promises, in an author’s note, that his story is a lived experience, or more accurately, a collection of lived experiences woven into one narrative memory. It is a “composite of childhood experiences,” he says, without detailing which parts of the book, if any, are fiction.

Despite the title and festive cover, A Christmas Memory is disappointingly not really a Christmas story. It’s a story about a friendship that develops between a young boy and his elderly neighbor.

It opens with a family tragedy in 1967: the loss of the narrator’s older brother, who was killed in the Vietnam War. “He had promised to be home for Christmas. He kept his promise. Just not in the way we hoped.”

The narrator — presumably Evans, or some version of Evans, as he is called Richard or Ricky throughout the book — is “an awkward boy of eight with Tourette’s syndrome” who suffers 20 different kinds of tics. The family’s troubles get worse after the brother dies. The father is unemployed, the narrator’s grandmother dies, the family moves from California to Utah and then Richard’s parents separate.

The boy takes all of this hard. One day, while he is outside sobbing, he is comforted by a dog, which turns out to belong to a neighbor he later learns is named Mr. Foster. Mr. Foster is Black, which is unusual in Utah, which is “homogeneous as whole milk.” The man keeps to himself, for reasons that gradually become clear.

One day, Mr. Foster rescues Richard from bullies, and the two develop a relationship. At first, it seems mostly business. Mr. Foster hires the boy to shovel snow and to walk his dog, Beau, a deal they consummated with (possibly the most Utah thing ever) a snack of hot croissants with strawberry preserves. The two grow closer, with Mr. Foster gradually revealing parts of his life as the boy’s visits become more regular. At Thanksgiving, Mr. Foster invites young Richard and his mother to his house for the holiday meal, and there is finally a hope that with the start of the Christmas season, something Christmassy might ensue.

Alas, no.

The story culminates in December, that is for sure. There is a subplot about a cruel public school teacher who, for reasons that are not fully explained, basically ruins Christmas for her whole class with an angry tirade about Santa Claus. But there are also tragedies of mental health and physical health that, for all Evans’ narrative gifts, make this a bit of a downer to read, especially around the holidays. That’s not to say that depressing circumstances don’t make for a good holiday story; the travails of Jim and Della in O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” make one of the most beloved Christmas stories despite its soul-crushing ending. And for anyone suffering the loss of a loved one at Christmas, this little book might be a comforting read.

As Mr. Foster tells young Richard, “We hate grief because it hurts. Not everything that hurts is bad. Whatever grief may be, it’s one thing for certain. Grief is the truest evidence of love.”

Reader reviews warn that Foster, who is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is heavy-handed with Christian imagery and themes, but this is not the case in A Christmas Memory, aside from a few references to resurrection and an afterlife. For anyone who celebrates Christmas, this certainly wouldn’t be off-putting.

It’s tempting to compare Evans’ Christmas titles to the mauldin “Christmas Shoes” song and movie, which grew out of a story that circulated on the internet and has, at least in my house, become a subject of mockery. But Evans is a much better storyteller than that, and his commercial success shows that there is an appetite for these sorts of books, particularly since major publishing houses have lately failed to deliver any intellectually stimulating holiday titles, instead concentrating their efforts on cheesy Christmas romances and Hallmark movie fare.

A Christmas Memory is no A Christmas Carol, and Evans is no Charles Dickens. But it is a holiday bonbon of a book in a genre with disappointingly few choices, and it’s a serviceable and poignant story, particularly for anyone tending more toward misery than merriment this Christmas season. B

Screaming on the Inside, by Jessica Grose (Mariner, 197 pages)

Every decade or so there emerges a new book by a writer who became a mother and was clearly not up to the task. The latest in the genre comes from The New York Times’ Jessica Grose, whose Screaming on the Inside is billed as an indictment of how society treats its mothers. In fact, it’s more of an indictment of the life choices that Grose has made. This is not mommy shaming, just the facts.

Grose is an opinion writer for the Times, and also writes a newsletter about parenting. She has been yowling for several years about America’s mothers being in crisis, hence the book’s subtitle: “The unsustainability of modern motherhood.” This is a popular position in a culture that likes to aggrandize individuals’ problems into societal crises. Parenting is difficult, yes. And the pandemic added new stresses. But Groses’s assessment, which is as much a hysterical rant that probably should have remained in her personal journal, is tiresome to read and full of cringy confessions that undermine her case.

She begins by admitting that, despite covering family policy, she had not looked into the provisions of the Family and Medical Leave Act before getting pregnant at the time she took a new job. She was therefore shocked to learn that she could not just walk away from her new job when she developed debilitating morning sickness and severe anxiety (having gone off antidepressants while trying to get pregnant). She does herself no favors by saying that she “could barely leave the house because I was afraid of both barfing on the subway and sarin gas attacks,” nor by telling the story of how she was incredibly rude to one of her new editors on a work call. Not surprisingly, she was reprimanded and soon left that job.

Thus begins the pattern of the book: a tale of personal woe, followed by tales of woe from a few other women, followed by some statistics and comparisons to Europe:

“A study of around three thousand women from Norway, which has universal health care and paid sick leave, showed that three-quarters of women had taken at least one week of sick leave during their pregnancies. The median length of sick leave was eight weeks, and half of women needed between four and sixteen full weeks away from work. This is what should be standard for American mothers, too.”

We can definitely have a serious conversation about whether American companies are accommodating enough to pregnant women, but citing the number of women who take sick leave during pregnancy — in a country where paid sick leave is available — is probably not the evidence of need that Grose thinks it is.

But OK. Let’s continue to the birth of her first child and her admission that she’d barely even held a baby before coming home with one, her reluctance to breastfeed, her sad attempts to find friends who also had babies through mom groups. (“The only thing most of us had in common was that we had sex in March 2012.”) She later had to qualify her criticism, saying “This is not to say that all mom groups are judgmental and oppressive.”

Despite all the unhappiness and struggle, she then has another child, and takes a job at the Times when her daughters are 2 and 5. There, she comes under attack from the newspaper’s famously acidic commenters whose comments cause her, “in my darker moments,” to ponder the question: “Am I really somehow constitutionally unfit to be a mother?”

Well, yes and no. Obviously, there is no federal licensing for motherhood; otherwise America’s shrinking fertility rate would be even worse than it is. And she is right that mental health struggles shouldn’t be a barrier to having a family. But there is something disturbingly celebratory about how Gross talks about her mental health; in fact, one section of the book begins with the header “Celebrating my birthday with a Klonopin prescription.” This was, in part, brought on by the panic she experienced when schools and day cares shut down due to Covid-19, and a full chapter addresses the problems that the pandemic caused for parents and children.

Those problems are real and were worse for mothers who, unlike Grose, did not have jobs that could be done from home, husbands with health insurance and children’s grandparents who could help provide care. But it was a pandemic, a once-in-a-century (if that) event, so using pandemic problems as evidence of systemic failure is one more example of her flimsy evidence.

Mercifully, this is a short book, and she concludes by describing a conversation with a pregnant friend in January of this year. The friend was ambivalent about having another baby, and Grose was initially upbeat and tried to convince her friend to be happy about the pregnancy (“Once the baby is here, you’ll feel better! … Part of me wishes I had another!”) but then feels “awful that I was still conditioned to slap a happy face on her mixed feelings.”)

Instead of trying to look on the bright side, I guess we should wallow in the emotional mud with our unhappy friends. There’s a lot to be said for honest sharing, but there’s also much happiness to be found in positivity. Unfortunately, Screaming on the Inside is a collection of shared misery with a thin menu of solutions. D

Now is Not the Time to Panic, by Kevin Wilson (Ecco, 243 pages)

It’s another mundane day in the suburban household of Frances Eleanor Budge when she picks up the phone and hears a writer for The New Yorker say, “The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers.”

Frances numbly replies, “We are fugitives and the law is skinny with hunger for us,” as her daughter bangs on drums in the background and her husband makes a household repair.

After hanging up, refusing to answer the writer’s questions, Frances reflects, “Our life, which was so boring and normal, was still happening. Right at this moment, as everything was changing, it was like my life didn’t know it yet.”

Thus begins Now is Not the Time to Panic, the new novel by Kevin Wilson, whose previous work includes The Family Fang and Nothing to See Here. From that strange phone call, it’s a wild, comic ride, as Wilson takes readers back 21 years to when Frances, or Frankie, as she was called, was a teenager with a secret.

The teenage Frankie, who lived with her mom and three triplet brothers in Tennessee, was an aspiring writer with a lot of time on her hands when she met Zeke, an aspiring artist. The two bonded over animosity toward their absent fathers, their misfit natures and their boredom.

One day, while trying to think of something to do, Frankie remembered that there was an old Xerox copier in her garage that her troublemaking brothers had stolen from a supply building at the high school. It had previously only been used to photocopy the triplets’ body parts, and now wasn’t working. But Zeke figured out that it was only a paper jam, which he fixed. “This could be fun,” he says. “We could do something weird with this.”

Zeke suggested that Frankie compose a few lines, “a mystery or riddle that no one can solve,” and that he would illustrate it. Frankie complied, and Zeke produced an illustration that was equally odd, with a hellscape of shacks with roofs caving in, wild dogs, children in beds and two “giant, disembodied hands, the fingers withered and jagged, almost glowing” reaching in the direction of the children.

That night, they distributed 63 copies of the poster around town – on telephone poles, in the windows of businesses, in random mailboxes. The next day, they made 300 more. “The whole experience felt like what drugs must have felt like,” Frankie reflects. “It was the high of doing something weird, not knowing the outcome. I imagined my wild brothers had felt this so many times that they were numb to it. But for Zeke and me, well-behaved dorks, it was amazing.” It took a while, but soon a local reporter wrote about the mysterious posters, which he deemed sophisticated, suggesting the quote came from a famous French poet. Zeke and Frankie continued to distribute them, unnoticed. Theories begin to pile up. Some people said the posters were the work of a drug cult and were an ominous threat. The newspaper ran a story under the headline “Evil comes to Coalfield.” Meanwhile, other people in the town started making copies of the poster and hanging them up, too. One person was putting them on top of a water tower when he fell off and died.

Eventually, the story goes national and makes it to 20/20 and Saturday Night Live, and reporting on it wins a Pulitzer for The New York Times, and someone opens a restaurant called “Skinny with Hunger” and so forth. The “Coalfield Panic” becomes so legendary that random people start taking credit for it, but they are shown to be hoaxes, and Frankie has lost touch with Zeke and gone on to live her ordinary life. Which is why she is so unnerved when the writer for The New Yorker, an art critic, starts calling repeatedly, threatening to expose her.

On one level, this sounds like a madcap adventure, something that Christopher Buckley (Thank You for Not Smoking, Florence of Arabia) would write. But there is a poignancy that underlies the story, which is billed as a coming-of-age novel but is much more. It’s also about the source and meaning of art, and about how events from the past forever influence our life. “You hold on to something for twenty years, the expectations and possibilities bend and twist alongside your actual life,” the adult Frankie says.

While the ending wasn’t what I had hoped for (and perhaps not what Frankie and Zeke would have wanted either), Now is Not the Time to Panic was a joy ride from start to finish and moves easily through its two-decade time span like a fast-flowing river. It’s not the great American novel but it doesn’t pretend to be. It’s something even better: a novel that makes you laugh and think and is simply a pleasure to read. B+