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A Novel
by Cynthia Weiner
Book Reviewed by:A dazzling novel about one young woman's summer of infinite possibility...
It was the summer of 1986, when the girl was found dead in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum—half-naked, legs splayed, arms flung over her head. Larynx crushed.
There are two things Nina Jacobs is determined to do over the summer of 1986: avoid her mother's depression-fueled rages, and lose her virginity before she starts college in the fall. Both are seemingly impossible—when her mother isn't lying in bed for days, she's lashing out at Nina over any perceived slight. And after a blowjob gone spectacularly wrong, Nina is the talk of Flanagan's, the Upper East Side bar where young Manhattan society congregates. It doesn't help that she's Jewish, an outsider among the blue-eyed blondes who populate this rarified world. She can fit in, kind of, with enough alcohol and prescription drugs stolen from her parents' medicine cabinet.
Flanagan's is where she pines for the handsome, preppy, and charismatic Gardner Reed, whom every girl wants to sleep with and every guy wants to be. After she's introduced to cocaine, Nina plunges headlong into her pursuit of Gardner, oblivious to the warning signs. When a new medication seemingly frees her mother from darkness, and Nina and Gardner grow closer, it seems like Nina might finally get what she wants. But at what cost?
Freud called cocaine "a gorgeous excitement," but a gorgeous excitement for the wrong guy can be lethal.
Cynthia Weiner successfully transports us to New York City at the time. It seems as if we are living life alongside Nina, watching her navigate feeling like an outsider due to her sexual inexperience, hiding her mom's mental health struggles and her Jewish identity in a predominantly WASP social circle. She senses everyone has figured out belonging and adulthood except for her, and her insecurity and anxieties plague her. Nina is a likable and compelling character for whom you can't help but feel sympathy. The framing of the novel, as it starts with the murder, creates a mild element of suspense as we wait to know which character will be killed and who will be responsible. However, as the story went on, I almost forgot about the reveal, as I was immersed in Nina's daily life...continued
Full Review
(998 words)
(Reviewed by Letitia Asare).
A crime that occurred in the summer of 1986 in New York City inspired Cynthia Weiner's A Gorgeous Excitement. On August 26, a cyclist discovered 18-year-old Jennifer Levin in New York City's Central Park, dead due to strangulation and half naked behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, badly bruised and with cuts on her face. She had been days away from leaving to start college in Boston. Her killer was Robert Chambers, 19. Chambers said in his statements to the police that Levin pursued him sexually on the night of her death. He claimed she died of "rough sex," stating that she removed his clothes and was painfully aggressive towards him, and that he reacted in a frenzy to end the pain, thereby accidentally killing her.
Chambers ...
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A Gorgeous Excitement is the rarest blend of charm and suspense, at once delightful and terrifying, an expertly written non-coming of age that also serves as cautionary tale, as quintessentially haunting as New York City itself. Read it on a bench in Central Park, but only before night falls.
