A delightfully uncomfortable book about female friendship, loss, and love. This one will stick with me for a while.

Though I’m very late to reviewing this one, I really enjoyed it! It kept me interested, and I would recommend it to anyone who dabbles in this genre.

It''s delightful to read this book if for no other reason than Temple's prodigious gift of the English language, and her ability to capture the beauty and terror of young women--or, perhaps, girls--and their sexuality, and the visceral way we are beginning to see them and understand them as complex people and at times those who can act out some intense horrors hard for any of us to stomach. Think Megan Abbott mixed with Nabokov, and perhaps some other books whose writers I can't think of, some Eastern philosophy thrown in, and the beautiful dread of it all. Temple is a gifted and lyrical writer and I look forward to seeing what she will write next!

Emily Temple trains a keen eye on female friendship and body, womanhood, and adolescent desire in this stunning debut. Precise prose, dark humor, and masterfully suspenseful — it had me hooked until its end.

Unfortunately, this is a story that just didn't work for me - Troubled teen girls at a Buddhist retreat. I abandoned it at the 30% mark on my Kindle. Perhaps younger readers might enjoy it more.

Thank you to NetGalley for this copy!

“Of course: a vanishing preceded by a goodbye is no vanishing at all, though it can be just as incomprehensible.”


The synopsis of this book intrigued me, and I was hooked initially, but then I felt as if it went a bit off the rails. The story seemed to be about one thing - a daughter searching for her father after he disappears - and quickly becomes many other things. Because there is so much to focus on, I felt as if the main story got swept under the rug and we never learned much about it again. Too much was trying to be done all at once with no resolution for a lot of it. I was into it when the story shifted to one of a cult-like environment, and it gave me a bit of a The Virgin Suicides vibe at times but this also went seemingly nowhere. I wanted to suspend my belief right along with Olivia, and even that was deflated by the ending the whole thing was given. I really did like the way that Temple wrote this, and how the novel was set up, I just think she tried to do too much at once and did not succeed fully.

Fans of The Girls and John Greene's writing will enjoy this book. The story wasn't for me, and admittedly I didn't finish, but I can see how others would love the world Temple created.

Thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins Publishers - William Morrow for this e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

This coming of age book is about a young woman going to a "spiritual" camp in order to figure out where/why her father disappeared a year before when he went to the same retreat. The writing style was good and the story was somewhat interesting but I was a tad bit bored up until the end. I must say, I did like how it ended and the questions that were left but I was ultimately left unsatisfied.

I absolutely love the cover though and feel it depicts the book very well. I think this book just isn't my type of New Adult I like BUT I'm sure there are others that would like this style of storytelling.

3/5

Thank you to Netgalley and Emily Temple for my copy by of The Lightness, for an honest review. I honestly don’t know what I was expecting from this book, but it fell flat for me. It seemed like it was going to be bold, a literary work to rival others. But to be honest it seemed like the strangest, book I have read in some time. Olivia, 16 years old, runs away from her mother. Which is odd because she used her mom’s credit card to go to this Buddhist camp and her mother never looks for her. She is running away from problems though, running away from feelings. Her father has disappeared from her life. Her mom is a free spirit, better at creating “art” and throwing parties than being a mom. Olivia meets up with three other campers. Janet, athletic, Laurel, who seems sexual and Serena, who seems to be an original mean girl. This group of woman want to reach the ultimate goal of this boot camp and levitate. In their attempt to levitate, the girls reach out to an older man who causes more problems than he is worth. The rest of the story is focused on back history of Olivia, which is pretty good, the writing is done very well and the girls attempt to levitate and the issues that arise from this goal. I really feel this story could have been so much more. It was in fact a 3 star read for me. I have recommended to a few people that I know might like this type of book. For a first book I do give the author credit for a book that mAde me think and I would read a second book. I just wish this wasn’t so superficial. This is just my opinion though and look forward to reading other reviews. I have posted this on my Instagram page. See my review on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

An eerie, atmospheric, immersive read—I was compelled by the characters and their dynamics, and will be interested to read more from Temple in future.

And yes, it's kinda sorta like A Secret History at summer camp, but also... not.
Blah Blah Blah teen girls are mean blah blah, but it's not just that.

Also, she quoted Broken Social Scene in, like, the second chapter so....

Unfortunately this was a DNF for me at about 30%. I think the plot was very interesting, but the pacing of the story was jarring and I didn’t feel much of a flow to the writing style. Often there were sentences and paragraphs void of substance, which I think could have been edited out for a shorter book, or to give space for more character & plot development.

Many years ago, I submitted to a writing workshop a piece about a young woman in a small town in Southern India in the early 20th century. In the hall before class the night we were to workshop the piece, I ran into a fellow student, a smart and careful reader and a talented writer. She was the only Indian American in the class, and I knew that she’d spent months at a time in India visiting extended family. That night, she gave me one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received about my writing when she said, somewhat self-consciously, “I tried to hate it.” She tried, but she didn’t.

I thought of my friend’s confession frequently as I read The Lightness by Emily Temple, a retrospective coming-of-age story of 16-year-old Olivia, who runs away to a Buddhist summer camp for troubled girls, in part to look for her father, who was last seen there years earlier. Olivia falls in with a trio of friends trying with typical teen intensity to learn to levitate, and the novel casts the girls’ passions and identity-making in a Buddhist light.

I’ve practiced Buddhism in the Therevada tradition – the strain from which Westerns have extracted “mindfulness” – for two decades, including about 250 days in silent retreat, and I can be un-Buddhist-ly defensive when it’s misrepresented. Many years ago, when I told a colleague I was a Buddhist he quipped, knowingly, that the central tenet is “Life is pain.” Buddhism according to “The Princess Bride,” I retorted, but it wasn’t funny to me. The first time I heard the dharma, the Buddhist teachings, I remember thinking, Finally, someone is telling the truth around here. I had found a subtle but sublime set of teachings which, it was clear from my first exposure, had the potential to transform me into a more contented version of myself. I still feel protective of those teachings – as if they need me to protect them – so, when I read Sarah Gerard’s review of The Lightness by Emily Temple (William Morrow, pub 6/16/20) calling it “a beautiful meditation on meditation, with readings of sacred texts and light Buddhist history,” I was intrigued. I am not a hater, as the LA expression goes – I don’t typically read to sneer – but I found it impossible to enter the novel open-minded. I admit, self-consciously, that I tried to hate it.

Most of the Buddhism in The Lightness is Tibetan, a form from the Mahayana tradition, which split from Therevada two thousand years ago. Rinpoches, sand mandalas, Kyudo, Ikebana, and the Shambala Institute all make appearances. I have little experience with these cultural aspects of Mahayana, but the novel’s deeper treatment of Buddhism resonated. For instance, I related to Olivia’s description of the effect on her father of intensive retreat: “He always seemed different to me in the days following his return: there was a new delicate rawness there, a lingering sense of sublimation, as if his external layers had been steamed loose and peeled away. After a while, they would grow back. A while after that, he’d leave again.” Later, she invokes a common metaphor for the inherent unreality of identity when, after being disillusioned with her friend, she says, “I can liken it only to the moment when, during a climactic scene in a film you’re watching in the theater – perhaps it’s a horror, perhaps a romance – you notice, for an instant, the texture of the screen itself.” Even emptiness, that notoriously slippery subject, is presented in a robust way.

One of the novel’s central concerns is craving, a concern at the intersection of all Buddhist traditions. Olivia, and Temple, are transparent about the intensity of teen desire and the undercurrent of violence that accompanies such passion. Temple’s characters will do whatever it takes to get what they want, and Olivia is intermittently aware of the liberating alternative to being caught in craving. Through much of the novel, we are suspended between wanting’s two valences: the fist of desire that prevents contentment, and the sweet longing that propels us to freedom.

Temple never rejects Buddhism (although Olivia does, at times), but neither does she romanticize the West’s version of it. I loved Olivia’s comment on American Buddhists: “I’ve seen a pattern. Upper-middle-class white people, looking for meaning. Looking to hook themselves to someone else’s old magic.” Harsh, but she’s got a point.

I wasn’t always convinced that Olivia had a strong grasp of Buddhism. But she isn’t supposed to. She is not a reliable narrator, as she herself will tell you (perhaps a bit too often), or a particularly enlightened one. Even at the retrospective distance of early adulthood from which she tells this story, she waffles between rejecting religion outright and gravitating back to the lure of emptiness and mystery. What mattered to me was not whether Olivia got the dharma, but whether Temple did. And by the end, she had convinced me.

The key to Temple’s success, I think, is that she never shies away from ambiguity. Several of the characters are left ambivalent, most notably the twenty-something heartthrob Luke, who may or may not be taking advantage of the girls’ innocence. Olivia’s thinking waffles constantly, with much negative capability, as when she muses about her missing father: “Here’s a version: my father loved me. He just loved his religion more. And here’s a version: he was right. He made the right choice.” With each new epiphany, intimacy, and betrayal, Olivia, both the teen and the older narrator, pulls us into her view-of-the-moment. We get a good dose of Olivia’s rejection of Buddhism – the cliched “religion has done more harm than good” – so that when she does an about-face, we feel the longing, the questioning, the indecision. Olivia doesn’t know what the truth is, and that is exactly the right place to be.

The novel’s end is beautifully ambiguous, and in my view, utterly successful. In the closing scene, the reader is at liberty to choose what’s true. As in practice, as in life, we are left a bit in the dark, having to peer closely to decide what is real.

Buddhist Mean Girls. A Buddhist retreat camp brings together a group of teenage girls who try to find the secret to Levitation. A chunky gardener is included to show them the way. I enjoyed the side storytelling of sleeping beauty and the various literary and religious references. The backgrounds of some of the girls wasn't provided and their individual needs were somewhat clinched. Overall, the story was original and well written in parts.


Copy provided by the publisher and NetGalley

Not a bad story, but definitely wasn't for me. Unfortunately this seemed like another case of "I really wish this wouldn't have been portrayed as __________ meets _______."

If I'm being honest, and I think people want me to share my honest opinion - this novel tries so hard to be what it isn't that it fails to be what it could have been. The author mentions The Secret History in every interview I've seen, and blurbs and reviews have followed suit, but I don't find that here. The frequent heavy-handed foreshadowing almost made me quit multiple times. And we almost lose track of the deeper layers about parents and friendship and striving for the imaginary. The setting of the actual events in the novel is a titch too imaginary or unreal to fully resonate with the lives of the characters. It feels very much like an MFA novel, trying too hard to be profound when it was already there in the smaller moments.

I'm giving it three stars instead of slamming it because she clearly can write, and the weird setting (a mountainous camp where people come to learn how to levitate) and missing father and girl friendships are likely to appeal to some readers who won't be as turned off as I was by the Secret History aspirations or overuse of foreshadowing.

I was so intrigued by this book and especially by the comparisons to Donna Tartt, but I'm afraid it did not live up to the hype. I enjoyed aspects of the writing and the initial premise was promising, but the unfolding of the plot and the eventual climax was pondering and disappointing. I wanted to feel the tension building, but it all played out predictably. I also became increasingly annoyed by the narrator's habit of issuing vague comments about the events "well you might have suspected that, or maybe not." There's not enough happening for me to suspect anything or not!

This is a dark and moody coming of age story. Olivia’s father has disappeared, and she thinks the last known place her father was at a Buddhist retreat. Olivia heads up to the mountains for the teen girl camp. The dense, intellectual writing made this a hard book for me to get through.

I am a big fan of Emily's work on Lit Hub and now I am a big fan of her first novel. I liked the sly sense of humor, often in parenthetical clauses, and the way the characters developed in my mind. The writing was precise and the plot caught me.

This was such a unique story with a writing style I really loved. I found myself highlighting so many passages. This book was filled with great one-liners. The vibe of the story reminded me of The Grace Year or The Secret History, where there is a group of friends who are morally gray and the overall tone is unsettling and intriguing. The story was addictive, but I can't say I was completely satisfied with the ending....I wanted more explanation or more closure to the story, though I do not know exactly how that could have been accomplished.