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Book Reviewed by:Told in vibrant, quicksilver prose, The Falconer is a coming-of-age story, providing a snapshot of the city and America through the eyes of the children of the baby boomers grappling with privilege and the fading of radical hopes.
New York, 1993. Seventeen-year-old Lucy Adler, a street-smart, trash-talking baller, is often the only girl on the public courts. At turns quixotic and cynical, insecure and self-possessed, Lucy is in unrequited love with her best friend and pick-up teammate Percy, scion to a prominent New York family who insists he wishes to resist upper crust fate.
As she navigates this complex relationship with all its youthful heartache, Lucy is seduced by a different kind of life - one less consumed by conventional success and the approval of men. A pair of provocative female artists living in what remains of New York's bohemia invite her into their world, but soon even their paradise begins to show cracks.
The Falconer is an instant female coming-of-age classic replete with 1990s nostalgia; equal parts cinematic and contemplative, cynical and doggedly hopeful. Dana Czapnik's protagonist will undoubtedly draw comparisons to Holden Caulfield, the archetype of teenage misanthropy, but she is so much more than that — a completely original and exceptional creation...continued
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(Reviewed by Lisa Butts).
Lucy Adler, the teenage protagonist in The Falconer, is influenced by her older cousin, Violet, a painter and feminist who provides a model of independent womanhood (albeit an imperfect one). In one scene, Violet takes Lucy to a bookstore and buys her copies of French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir's seminal texts, The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex.
Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908 and exhibited a brilliant and creative mind from an early age. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, becoming only the ninth woman to graduate from the college, which had only recently begun admitting women. She met Jean Paul Sartre there, and the two began their lifelong personal and professional collaboration. They were romantically...
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Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.
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Chloe Benjamin, author of The Immortalists and The Anatomy of Dreams
Meet Lucy Adler. As I read The Falconer, I felt like I'd found a literary cousin of Holden Caulfield - if Holden were a straight-shooting, hip-hop-listening, court-dominating, seventeen-year-old Jewish-Italian girl. Dana Czapnik has crafted a wholly original coming-of-age story. In basketball terms, The Falconer is a fearless three-point shot.
