The girl who never read Noam Chomsky

Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Readers meet Leda, the girl at the steady center of Casale's sharp debut, during her college years and spend the rest of the novel, which is also the rest of Leda's life, getting to know her. Inspired by the, no doubt, impeccable taste of an intriguing but surly coffee-shop stranger, young Leda buys a copy of Noam Chomsky's Problems of Knowledge and Freedom. She'll keep it forever, through decades and moves and weedings of her ever-growing book collection, but won't ever know much about it beyond that it smells good. But for this one book Leda never reads, there are thousands of things she does, thinks, reads, and writes, which Casale relays with a careful, assured, and light touch each one veritably thrilling in its ordinariness. Leda falls in real love and abandons a writing MFA program to follow that love across the country. She marries, has a daughter, works, and wonders if she's a writer after all. God help her: she tries on swimsuits. In episodic chapters, Casale's perceptions about womanhood and seamless style make for pure reading joy. By her story's end, Leda is, and isn't, the same girl we met all those pages and years ago. And isn't that just right?--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Casale's elegant, sharply drawn debut follows Leda, a girl whose myriad goals-to read Noam Chomsky, to be "linear," to find love, to be a writer, to plant a garden-chafe against inevitable compromise and "oppressively real" life. In short story-like episodes, Casale explores the signal moments of Leda's life: a bad one-night stand; giving up grad school in Boston to move to California with her boyfriend, John; marrying and having a baby girl, Annabelle; seeing her daughter's first school play. Casale's clear-eyed examination of a woman's life is done with abundant humor-a swimsuit mishap in a department store fitting room is a laugh-out-loud gem-and aching melancholy: "Life could be so unreal and so vivid all at once you'd think it was a dream," Casale writes of an inconsolable Leda after the death of her mother. "She would search for her mom forever everywhere she would go." As a youngster, Leda believes the "first innate truth of her womanhood" is that one must "never be fat." The last innate truth, she finds, is that "womanhood is loneliness." In between, readers will be captivated by Leda's life. Agent: Amelia Atlas, ICM Partners. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

DEBUT When we first meet Leda, she's a self-absorbed college student obsessed with being linear (that is, skinny), who writes thinly veiled reenactments of her life for her creative writing class. This opening passage is relentlessly self-absorbed with a fetishized concentration on the inner life and feelings of an insecure young woman. Casale tries to maintain this inward focus throughout but with less success. Leda's life is divided neatly into sections; the tumultuous teen years are followed by the perfect boyfriend years that lead to the sacrifice-for-love years (after college, Leda gives up her spot in an MFA program to move across the country with her boyfriend John and is miserable). Next are the happy-family years after Leda and John get married and return to Boston and Leda's attention shifts to her daughter. Eventually, Leda gets a part-time job and drifts into old age. VERDICT The later versions of Leda lack the intensity of the obsessed teen years, and the novel depends too heavily on readers relating to Leda. Moreover, the story's structure offers a particular Western idea of women's life span that may ring false for some audiences, though others will find it familiar and approachable.-Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

The interior life of a millennial Everywoman as she matures over the decades.Prepare to fall in love with Leda, the wickedly relatable protagonist of Casale's funny, insightful, and deeply adorable debut. When we first meet her, she's a college student studying writing in Boston, dealing with her annoying friendships with women, her unsatisfying encounters with men, and the loneliness and self-doubt at the heart of it all. As she moves through life, we see all her experiences from both the outside and the inside. For example, in a coffee shop exchange with her friend Elle about their future plans, Elle announces that, as far as she's concerned, it's time for the fantasy of becoming a writer to end. She just wants to set "realistic goals," she says. "Leda recognized the familiar wave of cruelty and cattiness that lingered in the comment, a rich but common display of the unabashed hatred and simultaneous press for superiority any woman could feel for another woman at any given moment." Soon after this meeting with her ultraslender friend, Leda decides to join a gym. "As she walked past all the men and their weights, she looked back at the women running and biking and stepping. Keep running ladies, she thought. You'll never get away." Much later in life she's in a dressing room, miserably trying on bathing suits. She has told the obnoxious salesgirl several times that her name is Leda, but the woman insists on calling her Lisa, shouting, " 'Lisa, how are the sizes working for you?' 'Fine.' I'll kill you, Karen. I'll kill you right now, so help me god." We follow Leda as she drifts away from her commitment to writing and toward her first serious relationship, relocating quite unhappily for her partner's career. One of the most moving and original parts of the book is when Leda becomes a mother and we can see how much her attitudes toward herself and other people have matured by the way she raises her own child. In fact, the depictions of Leda's connections to both her mother and her daughter are filled with love and warmth. This is so rare in contemporary fiction, it's almost hard to believe. But just as importantly, will she ever get around to reading Noam Chomsky?So much fun, so smart, and ultimately profound and beautiful. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Chapter 1 Deciding to Read Noam Chomsky   "I'd like to read noam chomsky," Leda said. At this point in her life she had a stack of books she kept by the bed and a splinter in her right hand. She should have thought more closely about cleaning out her microwave. She had class on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Each week she'd sit in the window seat at the back of her school's library and study. On this day she had cried listening to "All You Need Is Love" as she took the subway to school. She didn't want people to know she was crying, so she took great care to blink away as many tears as she could, but she did so hope that there was nothing you could do that couldn't be done . She ate a partially crushed scone as she studied that afternoon. Later she'd have another scone before bed. This was the only time in her life she consumed multiple scones in one day. As she ate she thought about the boy who lived in the apartment across the street and the word Umbria . The scone was blueberry, and after she finished it she folded up the wax paper and put it in her left coat pocket. The only reasons she'd remember for wanting to read Chomsky were all the varied intellectual ones that took precedence in her mind: an article she'd read, a speech she'd heard, a professor's suggestion. She didn't think of that day or that boy in the coffee shop, but the influence was no less significant, as faint and feckless as it was, a startling, disintegrating moment between herself and this stranger bursting and scattering like any and all moments of her life. She gave little more attention to it at the time than to the scone or to herself crying over a song she loved. The coffee shop itself was near her apartment and one she frequented often. "This café is so small, but its aesthetic is exceptional,"was the way it had been described by a middle-aged woman in trendy clothes who once stood next to her in line. The woman bought a large coffee and some type of vegan muffin. Leda thought the muffin looked tasty and bought the same one and then took a bite and realized it was vegan. From then on when she thought of the café she thought of it as so small with an exceptional aesthetic and terrible vegan muffins . Not long after, they'd started selling vegan donuts that were considerably better, but Leda would never find herself trying them. If she had, it's unlikely she would have amended her perception ofthe place. It was already burned into her by the ephemeral moment beside that woman in line. That day, though, she ordered a hot chocolate and sat at a table in the corner. What she loved most about sitting at the coffee shop was not the coffee or the shop but the brief, listless feeling it gave her of having her life together. She could sit beside the richness and warmth and see herself as something so divinely competent. This is what it is to be an independent person , and she'd take a sip. This is what it is to be a cosmopolitan person , and she'd take a sip. So easily could she lose herself in the sense. It was haunting and complicated and undeniably silly. Outside she watched as a woman picked up dog poop in a plastic bag. At least I know that I don't really have my life together. At least I know that I don't know , she thought. She sat for a while longer before noticing the boy to her right. He was smartly dressed, with flood pants and thick-rimmed glasses. His hands were large, and he was reading American Power and the New Mandarins . She leaned forward in her seat and ran her fingers through her hair. Most days she held a very strong belief that her hair looked terrible except right after she'd run her fingers through it. She fixed her shirt and adjusted her boobs, which had been lost in her bra to some degree. The boy looked like he was about twenty-four and possibly went to Boston University or was applying to a funded graduate program. She hoped he'd come over and say something charming or witty, as she imagined a man with such nice glasses might. She cleared her throat to get his attention, but he didn't look up from his book. She got her phone out of her bag as noisily as possible and then sighed loudly, but nothing. After waiting a bit longer, she got up and walked past his table, headed for the napkins. She took three. He didn't notice her. She reached her hand down to the fourth napkin; for a second she had a sense that he might be watching her, but when she turned around she saw he hadn't looked up. She stood there for what was an inappropriate amount of time to get napkins, but she couldn't help it. Why can't I just go talk to him? she thought. He had such a dumb sweater on and his face was sour. She considered that maybe he wasn't even reading but pretending to read, seeking that same sense of solace she felt sitting with her hot chocolate. Who is he in this coffee shop? No one, just like me. Can't we be no one together? In an unprecedented strike of confidence, she decided to walk up to him. It was impulsive and decisive. If you'd asked her then, she may have said her hair always looked nice and that she didn't need to run her fingers through it at all. "What are you reading?" she asked him. "What?" "That book." "What?" "What are you reading?" "Oh . . . It's by Noam Chomsky." "Oh." The silence between them felt stale and all-consuming. She searched for the right segue into marriage and children, but there was nothing. "I just needed a napkin," she said, waving the napkins. "What?" "Oh, nothing . . . Can I have this chair?" she said, pointing to an empty chair that didn't belong to his table at all but to the empty table beside him. ". . . I guess so?" She dragged the chair noisily in the direction of where she had been sitting. When she sat back down her hot chocolate was cold.She pretended she got a phone call and left. That was her last encounter with the future BU graduate. A few weeks later she bought Problems of Knowledge and Freedom  in a small bookstore specializing in rare and overpriced books. Walking through the aisles, she ran her fingers down the spines of books and smelled the softness of paper over her, under her. She didn't think of the boy or the napkins, but she did think of Noam Chomsky as the book cover grew sweaty in her palm. She relaxed her hand, wiped the sweat on her skirt, opened the book to page 53, closed it, and took a deep breath. Chapter 2 The First Innate Truth Nearing her early twenties, Leda had become obsessed with being linear. Latitude and longitude had formerly been ascribed to maps and a vague notion of Christopher Columbus she stored on the dwindling shelf of third-grade history in the back of her mind. To be linear was to be lines of thinness from her head to her feet. Lines and thinness. Thinness like her legs lifted over her head as she lay on the beach watching her legs, stinging sand in her eyes, blue everywhere. Lying down she could get away with it, but standing it was undeniable to her that she was not nearly linear enough. "Latitude Is Attitude," she saw on a T-shirt once and never understood. Even as she was now so concerned with linearity and the latitude of herself, that T-shirt was still a confused lake in her mind. The girl who wore it had large breasts. And that was all she really remembered. I do not want to live in the horizontal of my stomach. I do not want to be my thighs. I want to be linear. This compulsion to be linear began at age twelve and would persist until her death. It was very important, VERY IMPORTANT not to be fat. This was the first innate truth of her womanhood. Excerpted from The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky: A Novel by Jana Casale All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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