Althea & Oliver

Gr 9 Up—This richly satisfying debut defies simple description. On its surface, it is about teenage best friends, a boy and a girl, who have complicated and messy feelings. Friends since they were six, the teens have grown up doors apart, both in single-parent families in Wilmington, North Carolina. What sets this novel apart is the way the youth are allowed to speak for themselves in all their chaotic, exciting complexity. Althea, who has anger issues, is in love with Oliver, which would be complicated enough even if Oliver didn't seem to be a modern-day Rip Van Winkle, falling into a strange, deep sleep at random moments and not waking up for weeks or months. Oliver's mom, Nicky, finds a doctor in her home city of New York who is conducting a study of this disorder, called Kleine-Levin Syndrome, and Oliver grudgingly agrees to participate. While he navigates the strange world of a hospital ward filled with other teenage boys with KLS, Althea tells her dad that she's taking a road trip to visit her mom in New Mexico, but then heads to New York City to find Oliver. Instead, she falls in with a collective house of crusty punks in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, who are perfectly described with deep familiarity instead of exotic detachment. Oliver's medical condition functions as both an interesting narrative quirk and a deeper metaphor, and the resolution is satisfyingly uncertain. The novel is set in the mid-1990s, which is vividly re-created with plenty of drinking, sex, and rock and roll, but it is the exquisitely created and painfully real, pitch-perfect characters who make it so memorable.—Kyle Lukoff, Corlears School, New York City