Falconer

An unsentimental education in the ways of love, art, friendship, and becoming a woman that "will thrill readers of all generations" (Colum McCann). It's 1993 and Lucy Adler, a street-smart, trash-talking baller, is often the only girl on the public courts in New York. At turns quixotic and cynical, insecure and self-possessed, Lucy is in unrequited love with her best friend and pick-up teammate Percy, a scion to a legacy New York family who harbors the false belief he wishes to resist his upper crust fate. As the two friends circle each other on and off the court during their senior year of high school, Lucy is given a peek into the window of another life-one less concerned with conventional success and the approval of men-through a pair of female artists: her older cousin Violet, a idealistic painter, and Violet's roommate Max, a radical feminist provocateur whose star is on the rise. Over the course of the novel, Lucy and her companions wander through a rapidly changing New York during the last gasp of the twentieth century and provide a snapshot of the city and America through the eyes of the children of the baby boomers, whose central question has to do with privilege and the fading of radical hopes. In vibrant, quicksilver prose, The Falconer captures the bittersweet moment in a person's life when realism replaces romance and faces head-on the contradictions and complications of being a woman in the first flush of freedom.