Letting the Body Lead FROM THE PUBLISHER
When Jenn Crowell's debut novel, Necessary Madness, was published in 1997, it was an international sensation; more incredible was the fact that the author was a seventeen-year-old high school senior when she wrote it. With reviews and author profiles in The New York Times, Newsweek, and People, and translated into thirteen languages, Necessary Madness signaled this young author's prodigious talents as a novelist.
In her new book, Crowell introduces us to gifted NYU graduate student Isobel Sivulka. Though her academic and personal lives seem perfect, she feels without direction. Making the first rash decision in her life, she heads to Iceland, where a much-revered high school mentor once embarked on her own spiritual path.
In the very welcoming city of Reykjavîk, Isobel eventually discovers herself, bonding with a circle of strong, centered women and embarking on a tumultuous affair with a charming but deeply troubled man. In a culture completely different from her own, this accomplished woman must finally embrace what it means to be young and gifted, while coming to terms with life and love.
Author Biography: Jenn Crowell is a graduate of Goucher College.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Crowell made a splash with her first novel, Necessary Madness, an international hit penned when she was 17. Her second effort examines the plight of a precociously gifted woman a condition into which she might be presumed to have some insight. Twenty-five-year-old Isobel Sivulka is a doctoral student in psychology at NYU, completing a study of at-risk Brooklyn girls and their undergraduate volunteer mentors. She's something of a mess, despite her academic success and stable boyfriend: overwhelmed by her responsibilities, she can't sleep, forgets to eat and has hallucinations of a young girl standing at the foot of her bed. Just as she's about to finish her dissertation defense, she puts everything on hold and flees to Iceland, following in the footsteps of a high school mentor who had gone there years ago and had a revelation about her own status as a woman. Isobel house-sits in Reykjavik, where Ragna, a friend of the owner of the flat, introduces her to a set of high-spirited Icelandic women. The "radiant, earthen moments" she spends among them contrast with her affair with seductive but dangerous Kjartan, who is 10 years her senior. An alcoholic with a failed marriage, Kjartan is good in bed but too much for the vulnerable Isobel to handle. Her amalgam of neediness and privilege can be off-putting, but as Crowell alternates between Isobel's experiences in New York and Reykjavik, what emerges is a subtle, moving portrait of a young woman struggling to live up to her own high expectations. Agent, Jane Gelfman. Foreign rights sold in the U.K. and Germany. (May 20) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
This novel at first seems overwritten, the adjectives inappropriate, and the sentences confusing (" `This idyll, Isobel thought, must be tinged with violence' "), but the author is often trying to render feelings for which there are no real words. Detailing a summer trip to Iceland by psychology graduate student Isobel, this second novel by the 22-year-old Crowell (after Necessary Madness) is about women growing up and the inappropriate men they desire. Crowell writes some remarkably explicit but tasteful sex scenes, deftly handling the dilemma of recognizing an abusive relationship when one is sensually very pleased. Her book is peopled with strong women: Isobel herself, her mother, an Icelandic single mother, a bohemian teenager trapped in a Midwestern school, a junior high guidance counselor, and Isobel's dissertation director. Suitable for all fiction collections. Judith Kicinski, Sarah Lawrence Coll. Lib., Bronxville, NY Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Felicity goes to graduate school, cracks up, runs off to Iceland, and puts her head back together. Crowell, something of a splash when she published her first novel (Necessary Madness, 1997) at age 17, now describes the ordeal of one Isobel Sivulka, a 25-year-old psych student at NYU stalled in the middle of her doctorate. Isobel's from a small town in Pennsylvania where she was the most intellectual girl in her high school, and this adolescent isolation from the world around her seems to have persisted long after her move to the big city. Her boyfriend Gavin doesn't understand her and is rough in bed. The eighth-grade girls Isobel works with as part of her Ph.D. research are badly at-risk, and the school administrators appear unconcerned. She's not even sure that she wants to finish her degree at all. So she jumps at the opportunity to house-sit in Iceland, and leaves all of her New York problems behind. Iceland is very different from New York and Pennsylvania alike. For one thing, it's a foreign country. For another, it's really small. Most of the people in Reykjav�k are totally cool and progressive, and there's a ton of bookshops and neat cafes everywhere. Isobel hooks up with this really edgy guy named Kjarten ("He happened to Isobel on a Saturday night in late June"). He's really sensitive and everything (he can pick wild herbs and all), but he drinks a lot, and eventually Isobel realizes that they are just not in the same place. She thinks about Gavin, and she writes to her friends in the US, and eventually she sort of finds her center and decides that she wants to finish her doctorate after all. Leaving home and being in her own space for a while helped her get her perspective.Embarrassingly immature: a harmless story written in the sort of juvenile prose ("Being a woman in a body, and letting that body lead, is an act of blind trust") that good editors are not supposed to let into print.
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