The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky

February 5, 2018
Casale’s elegant, sharply drawn debut follows Leda, a girl whose myriad goals—to read Noam Chomsky, to be “linear,” to find love, to be a writer, to plant a garden—chafe against inevitable compromise and “oppressively real” life. In short story–like episodes, Casale explores the signal moments of Leda’s life: a bad one-night stand; giving up grad school in Boston to move to California with her boyfriend, John; marrying and having a baby girl, Annabelle; seeing her daughter’s first school play. Casale’s clear-eyed examination of a woman’s life is done with abundant humor—a swimsuit mishap in a department store fitting room is a laugh-out-loud gem—and aching melancholy: “Life could be so unreal and so vivid all at once you’d think it was a dream,” Casale writes of an inconsolable Leda after the death of her mother. “She would search for her mom forever everywhere she would go.” As a youngster, Leda believes the “first innate truth of her womanhood” is that one must “never be fat.” The last innate truth, she finds, is that “womanhood is loneliness.” In between, readers will be captivated by Leda’s life. Agent: Amelia Atlas, ICM Partners.

April 15, 2018

When we first meet Leda, she's a self-absorbed college student obsessed with being linear (that is, skinny), who writes thinly veiled reenactments of her life for her creative writing class. This opening passage is relentlessly self-absorbed with a fetishized concentration on the inner life and feelings of an insecure young woman. Casale tries to maintain this inward focus throughout but with less success. Leda's life is divided neatly into sections; the tumultuous teen years are followed by the perfect boyfriend years that lead to the sacrifice-for-love years (after college, Leda gives up her spot in an MFA program to move across the country with her boyfriend John and is miserable). Next are the happy-family years after Leda and John get married and return to Boston and Leda's attention shifts to her daughter. Eventually, Leda gets a part-time job and drifts into old age. VERDICT The later versions of Leda lack the intensity of the obsessed teen years, and the novel depends too heavily on readers relating to Leda. Moreover, the story's structure offers a particular Western idea of women's life span that may ring false for some audiences, though others will find it familiar and approachable.--Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2018
The interior life of a millennial Everywoman as she matures over the decades.Prepare to fall in love with Leda, the wickedly relatable protagonist of Casale's funny, insightful, and deeply adorable debut. When we first meet her, she's a college student studying writing in Boston, dealing with her annoying friendships with women, her unsatisfying encounters with men, and the loneliness and self-doubt at the heart of it all. As she moves through life, we see all her experiences from both the outside and the inside. For example, in a coffee shop exchange with her friend Elle about their future plans, Elle announces that, as far as she's concerned, it's time for the fantasy of becoming a writer to end. She just wants to set "realistic goals," she says. "Leda recognized the familiar wave of cruelty and cattiness that lingered in the comment, a rich but common display of the unabashed hatred and simultaneous press for superiority any woman could feel for another woman at any given moment." Soon after this meeting with her ultraslender friend, Leda decides to join a gym. "As she walked past all the men and their weights, she looked back at the women running and biking and stepping. Keep running ladies, she thought. You'll never get away." Much later in life she's in a dressing room, miserably trying on bathing suits. She has told the obnoxious salesgirl several times that her name is Leda, but the woman insists on calling her Lisa, shouting, " 'Lisa, how are the sizes working for you?' 'Fine.' I'll kill you, Karen. I'll kill you right now, so help me god." We follow Leda as she drifts away from her commitment to writing and toward her first serious relationship, relocating quite unhappily for her partner's career. One of the most moving and original parts of the book is when Leda becomes a mother and we can see how much her attitudes toward herself and other people have matured by the way she raises her own child. In fact, the depictions of Leda's connections to both her mother and her daughter are filled with love and warmth. This is so rare in contemporary fiction, it's almost hard to believe. But just as importantly, will she ever get around to reading Noam Chomsky?So much fun, so smart, and ultimately profound and beautiful.

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Starred review from April 1, 2018
Readers meet Leda, the girl at the steady center of Casale's sharp debut, during her college years and spend the rest of the novel, which is also the rest of Leda's life, getting to know her. Inspired by the, no doubt, impeccable taste of an intriguing but surly coffee-shop stranger, young Leda buys a copy of Noam Chomsky's Problems of Knowledge and Freedom. She'll keep it forever, through decades and moves and weedings of her ever-growing book collection, but won't ever know much about it beyond that it smells good. But for this one book Leda never reads, there are thousands of things she does, thinks, reads, and writes, which Casale relays with a careful, assured, and light touch?each one veritably thrilling in its ordinariness. Leda falls in real love and abandons a writing MFA program to follow that love across the country. She marries, has a daughter, works, and wonders if she's a writer after all. God help her: she tries on swimsuits. In episodic chapters, Casale's perceptions about womanhood and seamless style make for pure reading joy. By her story's end, Leda is, and isn't, the same girl we met all those pages and years ago. And isn't that just right?(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)