A unique new voice from an amazing GenZ talent, this is the perfect book to hand to readers who enjoy literary fiction and have sophisticated taste, yet are hoping to find something different. They will get that here, as this book explores different characters coping with relatable situations, all in a voice that makes the book very immediate, compelling and hard to put down.

First, Levy's voice is a hook. It certainly can be fun to read. However, most of the "stories" or "essays" in the book seem like first passes or free writing exercises: under edited and often eye-roll inducing. A lot of the observations feel 5 years late and under-thought. The voice is the draw here, and it doesn't feel like anything else comes through. Reading felt like sitting in a summer high school creative writing workshop and trying to find the positive things to draw out in between melodrama and purple self-pity.

Yikes! This book is a real stream of Consciousness flow with a whole new vocabulary composed of words and phrases that are completely unknown to me. Interesting as an exercise in being thrown into something for which I have no context but honestly I don't see that I can gain enough to make reading this worthwhile. Sorry!
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Honor Levy’s My First Book is a collection of zeitgeist-y stories exploring the taboos and mundanities of contemporary society. Levy often eschews plot to pursue clever turns of phrase. She loves to say the unsayable then say it again. I sometimes found Levy’s stories sameness to be a tad grating, but I would love to see how she develops her prose and style in whatever she puts out next.

I would say this book will be polarizing, but I actually just hope people won't read it. The title alone, MY FIRST BOOK, announces the juvenile, twee affect that runs through most of these stories. As with the best of twee, at times the stories have a wry edge or uncover some interesting insight. Mostly, however, the book is utterly insufferable. In her style, Levy wants to recreate Lolita's childishness and her quiet, though unnerving, wisdom. But Levy takes her understanding of Lolita from Lana Del Rey (without doing any justice to LDR), not Nabokov. Her archness quickly becomes saccharine, and her forced naïveté doesn't enchant readers but encourages cynicism and exasperation. The stories, or at least passages within stories, that show more wariness (e.g., "Good Boys") tend to work better, but their success doesn't redeem the collection as a whole.

The contents of these stories brim with cultural signifiers of a terminally online person who spent her girlhood on Tumblr among the social justice set and her early adulthood on Twitter among right-wing men. E-girl fiction feels inevitable, and just as inevitably, it sucks. Most readers, I think, will be instantly repulsed by Levy's book; the first page alone is a doozy. Those who finish it may try to defend its more mature and muted qualities. Indeed, Levy's occasional moments of self-awareness show signs of mature insight; the problem is that Levy herself seems more convinced that what she should offer her readers is her forcefully wide-eyed enchantment with people, the world, and God. That's a much harder sell, especially when Levy's own distorted prose makes clear the high price of buying in.

Let's pray that My Second Book doesn't try to follow in this vein or that Levy just goes to grad school or something.