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Justin Kramon’s debut novel, Finny, is a sweeping, enchanting voyage, an insightful story about a young woman’s complicated path to adulthood.
We meet Finny Short as an observant, defiant fourteen-year-old who can't make sense of her family's unusual habits: Her mother offers guidance appropriate for a forty-year-old socialite; her father quotes Nietzsche over pancakes. Finny figures she's stuck with this lonely lot until she meets Earl Henckel, a boy who comes from an even stranger place than she does. Unhappy with Finny's budding romance with Earl, her parents ship her off to Thorndon boarding school. But mischief follows Finny as she befriends New York heiress Judith Turngate, a girl whose charm belies a disquieting reckless streak.
Finny's relationships with Earl and Judith open her up to dizzying possibilities of love and loss and propel her into a remarkable adventure spanning twenty years and two continents.
Justin Kramon has given us a wickedly funny odyssey with a moving and original love story at its core. Finny introduces us to an unforgettable heroine, a charmingly intricate world, and an uncommonly entertaining and gifted young novelist.
"Combining snappy dialogue, frank attention to sex, and convincingly detailed characters--eccentric and sympathetic, but not sentimental--Kramon is clearly a find." - Publishers Weekly
"Combining the human panoply of David Copperfield with the cutting colloquial wisdom of The Catcher in the Rye...Finny is the rare authentic coming-of-age novel. The protagonist matures without losing her sparkle. Her view of people changes as she adds new facets to the prism of her consciousness. The supporting characters also grow in unlikely and often heartening ways."
- Michael Sragow, Baltimore Sun
"Imagine Charles Dickens had been bundled into a time machine, given a stack of Judy Blume novels to read en route to the 21st century, then asked to write a coming-of-age tale set in modern America. He might well have produced something along the lines of Justin Kramon's gently charming and slyly subversive debut novel." - Helen Brown, The Financial Times
"There are sad moments in Finny...but Kramon finds humor in sadness, and the novel’s overall impact is optimistic...Kramon is a talented young author and Finny a worthy read, and a dickens of a first novel." - Joseph Peschel, Boston Globe
"It's Kramon’s delicious way with a phrase that makes this a great read…It is a super summer book; buy it as a beach book or a rainy day book, but buy it." - Louise Leetch, Galley Cat
"Justin Kramon has written a magnificently odd and fantastic book, bursting with whimsy and humor. Finny is a heroine you will never forget." - Cristina Henriquez, author of The World in Half
"A fresh, appealing, funny, and big-hearted first novel by a fresh, appealing, funny, big hearted, and talented young novelist. With Finny, Justin Kramon has made a winning debut." - John Burnham Schwartz, author of The Commoner and Reservation Road
"Dickensian in its span and generosity, contemporary in its exuberance and furtive humor, timeless in its assessment of family and friendship, innocence and love, this is a debut novel of exceptional achievement..." - Jim Crace, author of National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel Being Dead
"Not a perfect book... but one that is suffused with tenderness and the promise of good things for the author’s future." - Booklist
"A colorless heroine, flimsy plotting and some sexually explicit moments transmute young adult-oriented material into something more peculiar and less satisfying." - Kirkus Reviews
This information about Finny was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Justin Kramon has published stories in Glimmer Train, Story Quarterly, Boulevard, Fence, TriQuarterly, and others. He has received honors from the Michener-Copernicus Society of America, Best American Short Stories, the Hawthornden International Writers’ Fellowship, and the Bogliasco Foundation. He teaches at Gotham Writers’ Workshop in New York City and at the Iowa Young Writers’ Workshop. Now twenty-nine years old, he lives in Philadelphia.
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