2018 School Spending Survey Report
When We Were Animals
Mulholland: Little, Brown. Apr. 2015. 336p. ISBN 9780316297936. $26; ebk. ISBN 9780316297929. F
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Gaylord (Hummingbirds), who also writes under the pen name Alden Bell (The Reapers Are the Angels), tells the story of Lumen Fowler, a quintessential good girl who grew up in a small American town with a strange secret: the town's teenagers don't just run wild in a metaphorical sense, they literally run wild with each full moon. Looking back at her adolescence from middle age, Lumen examines the year when the young people in her age group went "breach," spending three night a month bustling naked through the streets, engaging in primal acts of sex and violence, while adults and younger children hid in their houses.
VERDICT In Lumen, Gaylord creates an unforgettable and, well, luminous narrative voice, and his language captures the lush, dangerous possibilities of teenage nights to perfection. Working both as a contemporary coming-of-age gothic novel and as a metaphorical exploration of the importance and cost of exploring one's instinctual side, this book deserves a breakout success like that of Jeffrey Eugenides's first novel, The Virgin Suicides.
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