The Lightness

The Lightness, Emily Temple's debut novel, spins a darkly fascinating tale of female coming-of-age. Teenaged Olivia, left reeling from her Buddhist father's abandonment, arrives at the Levitation Center, a site of spiritual energy her father was known to visit. The area is also home to an isolated camp for troubled teenaged girls, in which Olivia enrolls. There, she is drawn into the orbit of three intense and magnetic girls--Laurel, Janet and their leader, Serena--as well as the attractive, 20-something male camp employee they all claim has special powers. Together, the girls are determined to transcend the mundane and learn to levitate, no matter what sacrifices are demanded.

Temple proves herself to be virtuoso of dark, playful prose. Olivia's first-person narration teases and unwinds her tale, twisting it through claustrophobic sequences at the camp, memories of her abusive childhood and snippets gleaned from spiritual, scientific and literary sources alike. While Olivia's voice controls the novel's sense of gravity, the slick but brittle, hard-shelled but tender-bellied girls around her are just as compelling. As the central foursome descends into more dangerous depths, the novel bears the weight of its slow-burn tension and raw emotion with a firm foundation. Ultimately, despite the story's haunting images and devastating themes, it's the girls at its center who ground this story, which is obsessed with mysticism, physics and fairytales. Dressed in heavy robes and tinged with blood, Temple's novel is ultimately a portrait of young women, vulnerable and powerful, who believe the world has more to offer them. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor

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