A Gorgeous Excitement

November 1, 2024
It's summer 1986, and Nina Jacobs is determined to lose her virginity before she leaves Manhattan's Upper East Side for her freshman year at Vanderbilt University. But the obstacles are many. Dosing herself with her mentally unstable mother's prescription medications, Nina has her heart set on sexy bad-boy Gardner Reed, but he's the heartthrob of every young woman at Flanagan's, where the entitled regulars sling barbs, slurs, and gossip and stoke rivalries. Nina acquires a new friend when tough and savvy Stephanie rescues her from a bad situation, and their cocaine-fueled adventures somewhat offset Nina's worries over her grandfather's dementia and her mother's increasingly alarming behavior. Then Gardner turns angry and volatile. Drawing on her own teen years and the notorious Preppy Killer, who murdered a young woman in Central Park, first-time novelist Weiner subjects smart, stymied, funny, and sympathetic Nina to harrowing, surreal, and funny predicaments complicated by class, misogyny, denial, addiction, and jealousy. Throughout, Weiner incisively captures the timbre of the time; the city's beauty, madness, and terror; the stunning recklessness of young women; and the endless complexities of families.

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November 11, 2024
Weiner debuts with a lush and thrilling study of preppy teenagers in 1986 New York City, inspired by the real-life slaying of an 18-year-old woman who was found dead in Central Park. The crime takes place in August and has little to do with the plot, which is devoted to another 18-year-old in the months leading up to the killing. It’s June, and Nina Jacobs is desperate to lose her virginity before leaving at the end of the summer for Vanderbilt. She hopes to accomplish this with Gardner, the handsome bad boy she frequently runs into at Flanagan’s, a dive bar on the Upper East Side. One day, she meets Stephanie, a girl her age, in Central Park, and Stephanie turns her on to cocaine. She offers some to Gardner, who was caught the previous winter breaking into Tavern on the Green, and they start sneaking off to the park together to snort it. Before the summer ends, a young woman is found dead in the park, and though it would be a spoiler to reveal the identities of the victim and suspect, the case makes Nina reevaluate her priorities and relationships. Weiner vividly captures her protagonist’s adolescent yearning, which adds to the tension as Nina continues pursuing Gardner despite the red flags. This is worth a look. Agent: Lisa Bankoff, Bankoff Collaborative.

Starred review from December 15, 2024
An 18-year-old girl in Manhattan faces the troubled summer of 1986. In an author's note prefacing her terrific debut, Weiner explains that she was inspired by her experiences during the summer of what became known as the Preppy Murder in Central Park. Her title quotes Sigmund Freud's characterization of the effects of cocaine, a reference that occurs to her intelligent, articulate, insecure protagonist, Nina Jacobs, as she's about to try the drug for the first time with her new friend Stephanie. It's the summer before Nina leaves for college at Vanderbilt, and she spends her days temping at office jobs--there's one working for a hotel chain, inputting the reports of undercover investigators on a Wang word processor; another, at an almanac that made incorrect weather predictions, has her sorting hate mail. By night, she hangs out with her friends at a bar called Flanagan's, where they don't card the underage patrons. There, she meets an extraordinarily handsome but moody boy named Gardner Reed, with whom she and every other girl in the place are wholly infatuated. Also taking up real estate in Nina's anxious brain is her mother, whose mental illness manifests alternately as immobilizing despair, random cruelty, and--after a medication change--manic wordplay and shopping. Weiner's recreation of the period and the milieu--the headlines, the music, the products--is like a perfect pointillist painting, all the tiny details adding up to a richly textured, authentic impression of the city as it was in that decade. Each of her young female characters--from the badass Stephanie, who snorts coke between customers at the fancy Maison Rouge housewares shop, to the snooty Holland Nichols, Gardner's girlfriend at the beginning of the novel, to the crude but ballsy Alison Bloch, who's braver than Nina in calling out the casual antisemitism of their prep school friends--is fully three dimensional. With the strong young characters and the skin-crawling atmosphere created by creepy men, crimes in the news, porn shops, and overheated adolescent sexuality, the book recalls another excellent true crime-inspired novel, Emma Cline'sThe Girls. Carefully paced and beautifully written, this edgy coming-of-age novel succeeds on all counts.

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