Fiona Warnick's debut, The Skunks, is a tender coming-of-age story about a college graduate's return to her sometimes stifling, sometimes comforting hometown. Speared with honest yet generous insights into summer-after-college dilemmas and angst, Warnick's novel captures the tender nostalgia of time spent in the liminal space between adolescence and adulthood.
Isabel can't help but feel a little stuck. Like the baby skunks she recently discovered taking residence in her backyard, Isabel isn't sure this is the right place for her, but she's still too tied to her youth to know where, exactly, to go next. Trapped in what she thinks about as "the tense for the things that have happened and continue to happen," she gets a series of jobs working at a yoga studio, babysitting, and house-sitting. She's determined to, as her childhood friend Ellie puts it, find a "healthy new direction," one that doesn't include her spending all her time "talk[ing] about boys."
But new directions are easier identified than taken. Soon, Isabel finds herself drawn back in by Eli, the son of a couple she housesits for as well as an old high school fling. Between navigating her changing friendship with Ellie, juggling her jobs, trying not to think about Eli, and obsessing over what the skunks in her yard might be trying to tell her, Isabel begins to find that life in her hometown does not necessarily mean being stuck. In fact, there might be just as much transformation happening in her own backyard as there would be if she had taken another route and left home to "seek her fortune."
Warnick's patient prose plumbs the depths of Isabel's emotional life while often skimming over the surface of her daily routines. These quotidian details, far from boring, are precise and measured, located in that achingly nostalgic time when people find themselves on the brink of adulthood, but still longing in some elusive ways for the past. Still, it isn't until Isabel's imaginative sections about the lives of the skunks who live alongside her that her conflicting inner desires are laid bare. These gentle meditations on the natural world go beyond a simple metaphor for Isabel's own questions of desire and ambition, stagnation and change, however. They probe what it means--what is gained and lost, seen differently or even just seen for the first time--when one remains, for a time, still. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor
Shelf Talker: A thoughtful and warm-hearted ode to the end of adolescence, Fiona Warnick's The Skunks is a coming-of-age literary gem.