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The Falconer A Novel Dana Czapnik 9781501193224 Books

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The Falconer A Novel Dana Czapnik 9781501193224 Books

The Falconer is a very special book that will stay with me.....always.
The author has given her narrator a voice that is so fresh, real and honest, at times it took my breath away. Her descriptions of NY neighborhoods & sensibilities are spot on. Lucy can come over & visit any time. Congratulations to Dana Czapnik for creating a classic coming of age novel.


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The Falconer A Novel Dana Czapnik 9781501193224 Books Reviews

Review by 2shay……….

Articulate, funny, honest, heart-warming and heartbreaking. Incredible.

Lucy Adler is a young woman who admits she doesn’t understand girls any more than boys. She’s one of those kids that always feels like an outsider. She’s a basketball player, a good one. She’s fit and talented. The boys on the public courts seldom let her play in their pick-up games, so she spends her time playing one-on-one with her best friend, Percy. Alexis is her best and only girlfriend, the only one who understands how little Lucy cares for clothes, make-up and the drivel that other girls crave. Lucy wants to play basketball and understand the world.

This book has been accurately described as a coming of age story. I couldn’t characterize it better. We follow Lucy through most of her senior year in high school, her triumphs on the basketball court and her tragic love for a boy. Lucy is smarter, more aware…more conscious than I was at that age. More worldly, I think. More mentally articulate. I admired her intellect.

That intellect comes straight from an extraordinarily articulate author. I’m really impressed. I understand that this is Ms. Czapnik’s first novel. I sincerely hope it’s the first of many. She is a smart, talented writer. I hope to read more of her work. I recommend this book to anyone who remembers being seventeen…or those who would like to remember.

Enjoy!
Sometimes a book finds me that I would not have found by myself. That is how The Falconer by Dana Czapnik came into my life--as an unexpected package from the publisher.

Reading it was about a seventeen-year-old girl in 1993 New York City whose passion was basketball and who has a crush on her best friend Percy, I wondered if I would care for the book. Sure, there was advance praise from Column McCann, Salmon Rushdie, Chloe Benjamin--but could I relate to the story?

I opened the book and started reading. The opening scene finds the protagonist, "pizza bagel" Lucy, playing basketball with Percy. I've seen basketball games. Only when the tickets were free. But the writing was so good, I found myself drawn into the scene, turning pages. There was something about this book, about Lucy's voice.

On the surface, I had nothing in common with Lucy. And yet Lucy felt familiar, her concerns and fears universal.

In telling the story of one particular girl from a particular place and time, the author probes the eternal challenges of growing up female conformity and acceptance by one's peer group while staying true to oneself; crushes on boys who don't see you; concerns about our attractiveness; what we give up for love; is the world is chaotic and without order, or can we find joy and hope?

There was a multitude of lines and paragraphs that I noted for their wisdom, beauty, and insight. I reread sections, scenes that elicited emotion or thoughtfulness.

I felt Lucy was channeling Holden Caulfield, who I met as a fourteen-year-old in Freshman English class in 1967. The Catcher in the Rye was life-changing for me, a voice unlike any I had encountered in a novel. The New York City setting, the wandering across the city, the characters met, the rejection of the parental values and lifestyle, Lucy's misunderstanding of a song line--Lucy is a female Holden, updated to the 1990s.

Lucy tells us that in Central Park is a statue of a boy releasing a falcon. She loves this statue but resents that only boys are portrayed in the way of the statue, that girls are shown nude or as children like the Alice in Wonderland statue. She sees in the joy and hope in The Falconer.

The Falconer, Central Park
Lucy experiences many things in the novel, including some pretty bad stuff. But she is resilient, holding to the joy and beauty she finds around her, the "the perfect jump shot" moments. She will inspire young readers and offer those of us whose choices were made long ago a journey of recollection and the affirmation of mutually shared experience.

I received a free ARC from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
This might be a terrific book. I only read to page 10. At that poin our hero plays some one-on-one basketball and calls a foul on her opponent. Then she takes a free throw.

No one in the history of the world has ever taken a foul shot in one-on-one playground ball. That kind of technical (no pun) mistake bums me out. So I closed the book and probably won’t pick it up again.
It was a great novel for encouraging young women to pursue sports. I found the protagonist to be negative throughout the novel. The author used most of her words for making lists, really it got quite tiresome. The “F” word was used to excess, especially for a young adult novel.
The Falconer is a very special book that will stay with me.....always.
The author has given her narrator a voice that is so fresh, real and honest, at times it took my breath away. Her descriptions of NY neighborhoods & sensibilities are spot on. Lucy can come over & visit any time. Congratulations to Dana Czapnik for creating a classic coming of age novel.