book review: Fall Back Plan by Leigh Stein
The basics: Esther, a recent Northwestern theater graduate, is jobless and carless, so she moves back in with her parents in the Chicago suburbs. (I adored this description of the suburbs: "The stillness of the humid night was punctuated only by the sounds of car engines cooling in the parking lot, and the sprinklers on the lawns of the surrounding houses along the streets named after trees that do not grow there.") My thoughts: When I first heard about this novel, it was billed as a "quarter-life crisis novel." While I understand where that moniker comes from, I don't think it suits this novel. There were a few passages, however, that do make a case for Leigh Stein as the voice of those in their early-to-mid-twenties: "I wanted whatever was going to happen to have happened already, so I could email my friends and tell them about it." Esther is a delightful, quirky, smart, and sad young woman. Her vision of life after college has not materialized: ...