Available:*
Material Type | Library | Call Number | Item Barcode | Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Book | Searching... Billerica Public Library | FICTION/TEMPLE | 33934004312543 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Burlington Public Library | F TEMPLE | 32116003730195 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Chelmsford Public Library | FIC/TEMPLE | 31480011379978 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Georgetown Peabody Library | FIC TEMPLE | 32120001311537 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Groveland - Langley-Adams Library | FIC TEMPLE | 32121000830063 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Hamilton-Wenham Public Library | FIC TEMPLE | 30470001836260 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Lawrence Public Library | FIC TEM | 31549004751920 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Littleton - Reuben Hoar Library | F TEMPLE | 39965002285962 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Middleton - Flint Public Library | F TEMPLE | 32126001740419 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Newbury Town Library | TEM | 32127001252298 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Newburyport Public Library | FIC TEMPLE E | 32128003861268 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... North Andover - Stevens Memorial Library | F TEMPLE | 31478003587251 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Rowley Public Library | FIC TEM | 32130000968062 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Westford - J.V. Fletcher Library | F TEMPLE | 31990004893322 | Searching... Unknown |
| Book | Searching... Wilmington Memorial Library | FICTION TEMPLE, EMILY | 32136003538166 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
"A teen thriller in the vein of the '90s horror movie The Craft . . . A beautiful meditation on meditation . . . Frequently hilarious, and thoughtful throughout." --The New York Times Book Review
"The Lightness could be the love child of Donna Tartt and Tana French, but its savage, glittering magic is all Emily Temple's own." --Chloe Benjamin, New York Times bestselling author of The Immortalists
A Belletrist Book Club Pick!
A Most Anticipated Novel by Entertainment Weekly * USA Today * Marie Claire * Elle * WSJ. Magazine * Glamour * Vulture * Bustle * Buzzfeed * The Millions * The Philadelphia Inquirer * Minneapolis Star Tribune * The Daily Beast * Refinery 29 * Publishers Weekly * Literary Hub * Electric Literature * and more!
A stylish, stunningly precise, and suspenseful meditation on adolescent desire, female friendship, and the female body that shimmers with rage, wit, and fierce longing--an audacious, darkly observant, and mordantly funny literary debut for fans of Emma Cline, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Jenny Offill.
One year ago, the person Olivia adores most in the world, her father, left home for a meditation retreat in the mountains and never returned. Yearning to make sense of his shocking departure and to escape her overbearing mother--a woman as grounded as her father is mercurial--Olivia runs away from home and retraces his path to a place known as the Levitation Center.
Once there, she enrolls in their summer program for troubled teens, which Olivia refers to as "Buddhist Boot Camp for Bad Girls". Soon, she finds herself drawn into the company of a close-knit trio of girls determined to transcend their circumstances, by any means necessary. Led by the elusive and beautiful Serena, and her aloof, secretive acolytes, Janet and Laurel, the girls decide this is the summer they will finally achieve enlightenment--and learn to levitate, to defy the weight of their bodies, to experience ultimate lightness.
But as desire and danger intertwine, and Olivia comes ever closer to discovering what a body--and a girl--is capable of, it becomes increasingly clear that this is an advanced and perilous practice, and there's a chance not all of them will survive. Set over the course of one fateful summer that unfolds like a fever dream, The Lightness juxtaposes fairy tales with quantum physics, cognitive science with religious fervor, and the passions and obsessions of youth with all of these, to explore concepts as complex as faith and as simple as loving people--even though you don't, and can't, know them at all.
"A suspenseful debut." -People Pick
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Temple's engrossing debut, by turns smart thriller and nuanced coming-of-age story, is set in a high-altitude spiritual retreat known as the Levitation Center, rumored to occupy the only American land where levitation is possible. Olivia Ellis is 15 when her long-unreliable Buddhist father, John, who separated from her mother several years before, disappears from her life after attending a Center retreat. The following summer, Olivia signs up for the retreat's residential program for teenage girls, hoping to find some clues as to John's whereabouts. When the enigmatic resident Serena, whose friends Janet and Laurel sneak out nightly to visit her private tent on the mountainside, invites Olivia to join their group and announces that they will learn to levitate, Olivia is eager to belong and to master her father's religion. Serena plies the girls with alcohol and coaxes guidance from Luke, the Center's seductive young gardener, who she says has levitated before. By the time Olivia begins doubting Serena's motives for encouraging dangerous methods, such as fasting and choking, events are spiraling beyond her control. While the frequent asides on fairy tales, etymology, and various intellectual concepts can feel distracting and distancing, the lush, intelligent prose perfectly captures the narrator's adolescent yearning. Temple's exploration of the power young women have over each other will appeal to fans of Susan Choi and Emma Cline. (June)
Guardian Review
It is elitist, precocious, histrionic and oh-so-earnest, but The Secret History - Donna Tartt's 1992 debut about murderous classics students - is literary alchemy, a cult novel that is beloved for all the reasons why it shouldn't work. Decades of imitators have only succeeded in making its singular magic more potent. Emily Temple's first novel, The Lightness, is one of the more preposterous Secret History facsimiles: in place of hedonistic scholars, Temple gives us nihilistic Buddhists on a quest to master the dark and furtive art of levitation. It is a premise that requires a mighty belief in suspension in order to suspend disbelief. Sixteen-year-old Olivia has run away ("if you can really call it running away when you leave plain tracks and credit card receipts and no one bothers to come after you"). She's taken herself to a geographically elusive, "pan-spiritual contemplative community" for high-altitude, high-end soul searching. It's the last place her father visited before he vanished, and, according to legend, is "the only bit of land left in America where levitation was still possible, at least for those with the correct set of aptitudes". Olivia arrives in time for a Buddhist boot camp, the kind of course wealthy parents impose on their unruly daughters. And how rhapsodically "bad" these girls seem to be: "They were slick-finish girls, cat-eye girls, hot-blood girls. They were girls who revelled ... They were girls who left marks. They were girls who snuck." Yet up on the mountain they dutifully take classes in Japanese flower arranging and Zen archery, do their chores and eat kale by the ladleful. Occasionally they glower at each other across the dining hall. It must be all the thin mountain air. The grand exception is an imperious trio of rule breakers: there's athletic Janet with her purple hair; soft and sensual Laurel, "an idiot savant for secrets"; and ringleader Serena, who speaks in k?ans and has her "cold-mirror heart" set on the ultimate act of transcendence. Together they lounge in Serena's elaborately cushioned tent, eating almonds, drinking whiskey and practising ASMR techniques. Serena is a folkloric creature around whom elaborate rumours swirl: witch, werewolf, virgin, slut. The consensus is she's not to be approached. But Serena seems to recognise something kindred in painfully self-aware Olivia, and Olivia convinces herself that levitation is the way she will find her missing father. "If I did what he did, loved what he loved, believed what he believed, I too might be transformed. Into what exactly, I didn't know ... a girl worth coming back for." For guidance in the art of being insubstantial, the girls turn to Luke, a twentysomething gardener with a luxurious topknot, mythic cheekbones and "strong digging arms" - a hipster incarnation of Lady Chatterley's smouldering lover. The Lightness does not need its ceaseless foreshadowing for us to intuit that things will not end well. After all, Luke lives in a cabin in the woods, and "when, pray tell, has any little girl ever found anything good in a cabin in the woods?" And so let us play a round of The Secret History bingo. An ungainly cipher of a narrator; check. A sleek clique of gorgeously broken young people; check. An ethereal bubble of unfettered privilege; check. A quest for transcendent oblivion that turns menacing; bingo. There is even a cheeky suggestion in the book's final pages that Temple's floating fairytale exists in a similar universe to Tartt's New England Greek tragedy. But while The Secret History was a novel of soul-curdling aftermaths, bisected by its murder, The Lightness is simply a novel of a looming bad thing. And we know the rough shape the bad thing will take from the novel's very first page. "A suicide, they said. Nothing to suggest otherwise. If not a suicide, perhaps an accident. The steep cliff, the shifting rocks." Where The Lightness does carry weight is in its scenes away from the mountain and its manic pixie dream friends, as we watch Olivia's family disintegrate: her artist mother who creates voluptuous sculptures of women out of steel; her aloof father who wears blue tinted contacts over his blue eyes for extra dazzle. It's here that Temple shows us why Olivia might yearn to be untethered. It is hard to shake the lurking sense - the hope - that The Lightness might reveal itself to be a sublimely subversive satire; a much-needed parody of our abiding literary fetishisation of girlhood, with all of its idolatrous hunger and coiled sensuality, or perhaps a scabrous caricature of pumpkin spice spirituality. Temple's description of the mountaintop centre, with its grab bag of courses from iridology to tantric sex, has promising raw-toothed bite. "I've come to be suspicious of American practitioners of Eastern philosophies," grown-up Olivia confides. "There's something so rapacious about them ... All that performative kindness. All that practised calm." Which is why it is so dispiriting that her novel opts instead for a twee permutation of a story we have seen so many times before. The Lightness leads us to the precipice, but when it comes time to make a bold literary leap, it loses its nerve.
Kirkus Review
Four teenage girls attempt to unlock the secrets of levitation in this unsettling debut from the senior editor of Literary Hub. Olivia's father left to attend a Buddhist retreat at the Levitation Center but never returned home. When Olivia flees her abusive mother in order to find out what happened to him, she spends the summer attending the center's retreat for teen girls. "They were slick-finish girls, cat-eye girls, hot blood girls," Olivia recalls. "They were girls who reveled. They were girls who liked boys and back seats, who slid things that weren't theirs into their tight pockets." But the crackling energy of three girls in particular catches Olivia's eye: commanding Serena, stoic Janet, and provocative Laurel. Under the direction of Serena, the four young women convince Luke, the center's gardener and a universal object of teenage lust, to teach them the secrets of levitation. In preparation, the girls fast on nettle tea, play dangerous fainting games, and attempt to seduce Luke. The summer wears on, and Serena pushes them each to the brink. At last, Olivia must confront the possibility that Serena's quest for control over their bodies might put them all in danger--or is that what Olivia really wants? Temple's evocative exploration of teenage girlhood, shame, and longing illuminates the double-edged desire for power and belonging. Her sentences are complex and rich, although the ominous mood of the novel occasionally overpowers the emotional payoff of its reveals. "You might as well learn this now: even the tiniest bit of power turns me instantly immoral," Olivia laments early in the novel, though it's difficult to say how much power Olivia ever wields. Still, Temple's narrative strategies of deferral invite us into a complex, psychological study of a young woman haunted by her past--and her capacity to hunger for violence and self-destruction. A dark, glittering fable about the terror of desire. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Olivia looks back on the teenage summer she spent at a remote meditation retreat, seeking answers to her father's recent disappearance. Some people believed the high-altitude retreat to be "the only bit of land left in America where levitation was still possible," hence its nickname, the Levitation Center. Olivia knows none of the other girls at what she secretly calls her "Buddhist Boot Camp for Bad Girls," and they don't know that she's there by choice. She quickly falls under the spell of a group led by enigmatic Serena, sneaking out of her bunk at night to drink and reach new meditative heights through sound and touch. Soon Olivia is pulled into their plans to achieve the ultimate height, levitation, with the help of the sexy (or is he creepy?) gardener whom Olivia works with for her daily chore. Literary Hub editor Temple keeps readers on a string with murky suspense, foreshadowed danger, and a spine-tingling sense of seclusion. Readers will also appreciate themes of idolatry, Buddhist spirituality, and teenage girlhood in this stylish debut.
Library Journal Review
DEBUT Olivia's childhood was typical until her father became a Buddhist, which eventually caused her parents' marriage to fail. After they separate, Olivia's father disappears and her mother begins to beat her. With a stolen credit card, Olivia runs away to the Levitation Center, a Buddhist retreat, where her father had previously studied, hoping to find him or to discover where he has gone. Once there, she is drawn into a group of girls who are veterans at the center, having come for multiple summers. Group leader Serena has special privileges, as do those she "selects" as her cohort; she is obsessed with learning how to levitate. Midnight meetings, starvation diets, alcohol, and forced fainting culminate in a cliff-side experiment that cannot end well. VERDICT Temple weaves Buddhist practice, rumor, philosophy, and teenage sexual longing into a story that is both deep and compelling. Her characters are complicated and conflicted, immersed in the throes of teenage angst and hormones. Any reader of general fiction would enjoy. [See Prepub Alert, 12/2/19.]--Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence