The Fallback Plan by Leigh Stein
My rating: 5/5 cats
**woo-hoo!! this is finally out!! come to my store and buy it!!**
so last friday i tried to go to some brooklyn bookfair bookend event at greenlight books (holla), but that place was packed to the tits and very warmly and moistly unpleasant, and i was wallflowering it over in the fiction section with my free beer and tonguing persistent fig seeds out of my teeth when i finally noticed i was not having a good time, and went outside to hopefully waylay the one person i knew who was going to be there, albeit flakishly late.
waylay successful!
and all of this to preface the most important fact that instead of spending my evening genitally crushed against overgrown boys in suit jackets over t-shirts and misguided facial hair, i instead spent it chatting amiably at a much more ventilated bar nearby, drinking a dark and stormy float (yeah, you heard me) and meeting the author of this book.
noticing, my red panda pin (hi, jen!!), she mentioned that her book had talking pandas in it. like, as an aside. in a conversation. not flooding my goodreads.com mailbox with review requests for books that even the most casual glance at my tastes will show i am not the audience for.
so i got me an ARC.
all of this namedropping and schmoozily written nonsense to say she was right.
her book does indeed have talking pandas in it.
and it is great.
do you need more? didn’t i just say “talking pandas??” these aren’t whimsical frolicsome pandas, they appear more as a story-within-a-story, breaking up the flow of an all-too-recognizable realism for some people. not to me, but maybe to you.
it is about a character, directionless after college, moving back home with her parents to figure it all out. to carve a path. to reflect and gain insight. to have a goal. to get laid.
it is funny and lonely and full of life. it takes the irreverent slacker stereotype and finally finally gives her a sense of humor. this character is so easy to fall in love with. because she is original and the humor is so frequently followed by melancholy, the way life tends to be. it’s one of the few books to which i can actually apply the exhausted cliche “comes to life.”
this could have so easily been an insufferable hipster novel about a rudderless young adult trying to overcome her own self-absorption long enough to realize that there is a whole world around her. but it is so much better than that. because she is never really jaded—she actually gives a shit, which is so nice in a novel chronicling this age. (says grandma karen)
so you can stand in a metaphorically crowded bookstore, sweating and being repelled by all the things you hate about brooklyn, crammed into a stuffy room together, reading the newest undeserved sensation brooklyn shits out. or you can choose to leave, and read something that actually has a soul, and will therefore most likely be a quieter sensation when it comes out in january (LGD), but trust me—this book will show you a better time, and it will definitely let you get a word in edgewise.
love it.
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