The blurry years

Kriseman's assured and affecting debut follows Callie from young childhood through her itinerant teenage years as she and her unpredictable, alcoholic mother, Jeanie, constantly attempt to restart and better their lives. In Tampa, Callie shifts loyalties between her mother's changing boyfriends and finds a lovable, stable adult in one of their brothers, Marcus, a person she will return to for comfort throughout her life. In Eugene, Ore., where Jeanie is originally from, after a desperate cross-country drive and nights spent sleeping in the car in parking lots, Callie and her mother reconnect with Jeanie's former best friend, Starr. And in Daytona Beach, Callie and her first real friend explore the darker side of the tourist town, trying on adulthood for the first time just as Callie's adolescence begins to look darkly and familiarly like her mother's life (depending on alcohol to get through her days and taking bad jobs instead of focusing on school), and she attempts to finally break out of the pattern of running she has always known. The novel's complicated mother/daughter relationship is provocative and richly developed, and Jeanie is an unforgettable, complex character: she starts the novel as difficult-but-loving but evolves into deep cruelty. Despite its too-neat ending, Callie's is an honest and memorable story about growing up in a world of bad examples. Kriseman's is a new voice to celebrate. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

A portrait of a girl's unstable and sexually fraught adolescence in Florida.Preteen Callie is headed back to Florida with her alcoholic, underemployed mother after a failed attempt to start over on the West Coast. She imagines driving away: "Everything outside would begin to blur...and it would feel familiar, which made me intensely sad, that a blur was something I could get used to." Kriseman's debut novel tells Callie's story of these "blurry years" as a series of snapshots taking place over about a decade as Callie's peripatetic mother ditches one boyfriend after another and tries to keep the duo's heads above water even as her daughter is drowning in loneliness. Callie begins reaching out in the ways that are the most familiar to her: In junior high, she's trying to cajole beers from local beachgoers and tagging along with her best friend when an older man invites them to his apartment. By 14, she's lost her virginity on a whim at a house party and is stealing lingerie from the woman she babysits for. Things get worse from there. From the first pages, we can see Callie's dissolution barreling toward her, but the novel's interest lies less in the familiar shape of its events and far more in the quiet melancholy with which Callie endures them. That her own rueful self-awareness can't stop her self-destruction is much of the book's powerso much so that when Kriseman tries to course-correct in the final chapters, it feels artificial. If Callie were real, we'd be desperately rooting for her to pull it together; as readers, we want her to linger in "the grimy bathrooms, the filthy bedrooms, the messy backseats of shitty old cars."An elegant, but uneven, glimpse into the life of a memorable protagonist. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.