Oola

February 27, 2017
In Newell’s debut novel, young writer Leif develops an all-encompassing obsession with his lover Oola as he attempts to pen a book about her. After growing up in New England and graduating from college, Leif travels the world, staying in hostels and house-sitting for relatives and parents of his friends. He meets Oola through a mutual friend at a party in London and tumbles into a physical relationship with her, asking her to accompany him to his latest house-sitting gig in Arizona. Leif peppers Oola with questions about her life, learning about her poor childhood in Los Angeles with parents on the fringes of the music scene. While it’s ambitious of Newell to chronicle Oola along with Leif, documenting his unhealthy descent along with her life story, the obvious pitfall of this book rears its head. The reader’s enjoyment will ultimately hinge on whether he or she finds Oola as fascinating as Leif does. The best parts of the novel happen when Leif isn’t saying things like, “Could you have resisted her, even if you’d had an inkling that this beauty was an act?” The plot comes to life once Oola is off the page and Leif engages with his childhood pal Tay, or goes out in a full Oola outfit, complete with hair bleached Oola blonde. Shortly after she’s fled him, Leif slowly loses it when he finds a diary that chronicles a wild part of her life that she’d never told him about. He sets out to find her musician ex-boyfriend Le Roy, and the book hurtles toward an unsatisfying ending.

February 15, 2017
Two young artists fall for one another in this twisted debut, testing the boundaries between love, obsession, and identity.When 25-year-old writer Leif sees Oola for the first time at a debauched party in London, he feels "an unassuming tingle" at the "sight of her shoulder blades" and makes his move. So begins Leif's obsessive taxonomy of Oola's body and history, from her sexual preferences to how she moves when no one else is watching her. At first, these two eccentrics seem made for one another, living and loving in a network of empty houses that stretches from the Arizona desert to Europe to a family cabin in Big Sur. It's here that Leif's earlier signs of fixation tip into something edgier and more consuming. On the road, Leif counts how many men follow Oola with their eyes, but in California, he takes notes on the ways she showers for a writing project fueled by "days of research, of study unhinged." Both the object of Leif's desire and an objectified cipher, Oola remains slippery and mysterious, barely tangible except as the presence that drives Leif to examine his own past--and what he might make out of his future. Newell's rangy, circuitous tale is a kind of queer Nadja for millennials with a self-satirizing--and satisfying--bite. A dreamy and provocative exploration of sex, privilege, and self-discovery.

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March 15, 2017
Newell, currently in her senior year at Stanford University, centers her first novel on Leif, a twentysomething, East Coast blue blood who's been hopping around his parents' friends' empty second homes during his aimless, postcollege years. At a party in London, he meets the gorgeous Oola, a few years his junior and an enchanting, six-foot-tall, female version of himself. Quickly, she joins him on his housesitting gigs; they're inseparable and in love. A few months and several stops later, Leif and Oola are living in the Big Sur cottage Leif's great-aunt has vacated for hospice when things begin to fray, though which of them is going crazy, or crazier, is hard to discern. Newell's debut suffers from a few things: a narrator whose unlikability becomes tiresome; occasionally halting, metaphor-heavy prose; and characters who don't ring true. However, her scrutiny of privilege's victims and beneficiaries, the fluidity of gender, the lonely writer's life, and love's desire to possess reflect Newell's obvious talent for observation and care with words.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)