Inappropriation

Starred review from July 23, 2018
Freiman’s stellar debut concerns 15-year-old Ziggy Klein, an awkward, precocious 10th grader who attends the politically correct Kandara Girls School in Sydney. As the daughter of a feminist psychotherapist, Ziggy aims to be her best self, even as she’s tortured by disparaging inner voices that she refers to as Hitler Youth. Ziggy has yet to hit puberty and is still figuring out her gender and sexuality when she befriends aspiring actress Tessa and her friend Lex, who wants to be a rapper in America. The duo introduce Ziggy to theories about otherness, sexuality, and gender, and take themselves way too seriously while also skewering the popular girls. Ziggy tries to keep up but the girls’ friendship deteriorates as Tessa and Lex start hanging out with boys and the cool crowd, respectively. Ziggy begins wearing a GoPro and publicly identifying as transhuman, which her school indulges, much to the other students’ chagrin. Tensions culminate on the night of the formal, when Ziggy and her friend Tim hatch a plan to drug and humiliate Lance, a popular boy who’s dating Lex. Freiman perfectly depicts the timeless awkwardness of growing up with the more modern awkwardness of having your life broadcast on social media, and thus growing up in front of the rest of the world. This is a very strong first novel from a promising voice.

June 1, 2018
Freiman's coming-of-age satire is a humorous and bawdy skewering of identity politics. Ziggy, 15, attends a prestigious Australian all-girls private school, where she struggles with having a flat chest, not being popular, and confusing sexual fantasies that often involve Nazis (her very personal way of working through her Jewish family's Holocaust stories). She doesn't really have friends until two of the school's other outcasts take her under their radical-feminist wings, a fantastic alternative to her mother's more traditional-gender-role feminist leanings. The girls' firm grasp of PC language mixed with their privilege and lack of diversity exposure lead to ridiculous and hilarious conversations about who among them is the most oppressed. Ziggy is a wonderful character to lead the satirical charge, as she's convincingly just trying to figure out who she is and how she belongs in the world. Her earnestness offsets the over-the-top humor (� la TV's Kimmy Schmidt). Although the novel loses some steam at the halfway point, Freiman's assured writing carries readers through to the surprisingly heartwarming end.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

May 15, 2018

Fifteen-year-old Ziggy Klein is a new student at Kandara, a tony private girls' school in Sydney, Australia. Smart, physically underdeveloped, and somewhat confused about her gender identity and sexuality, Ziggy falls in with Tessa and Lex, two other intellectual outsiders who school her in radical feminist theory and other ideologies they don't fully understand or otherwise mold to suit their needs. First-time novelist Freiman gently mocks their confused, adolescent antics, as the girls try on and discard identities like layers of clothing, expounding on "transhumanist feminism" while face-swapping with celebrities on their phones. Ziggy's Jewishness marks her as different at her WASP-y school, and her internalized self-criticism comes in the form of an interior monolog she calls "Hitler Youth." In the end, Ziggy is a winning underdog surrounded by strong female personalities, including her mother, Ruth, an extroverted therapist specializing in the "sacred feminine," and her spitfire Holocaust-surviving grandmother, known as "Twinkles" for her love of sequins. VERDICT A bold and heady coming-of-age tale with a biting sense of humor and a heavy dose of contemporary cultural critique; most readers will enjoy. [See Prepub Alert, 1/8/18.]--Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2018

A 2013 Center for Fiction Writing Fellow and fiction editor at George Braziller, Australian-born Freiman introduces us to 15-year-old Ziggy Klein, who's equally unsettled by her parents' sexual excesses and the radical feminism of her new friends at her swanky private Australian girls' school. Race, gender, and sexual politics; a Mean Girls for this century.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.