Stephen Florida

Starred review from March 27, 2017
PW reviews editor Habash’s finely rendered, dark, and funny debut novel follows Steven Forster (known as Stephen Florida, due to an enduring clerical error) as he wrestles for Oregsburg College in Aiken, North Dakota. A senior, it’s his last season to win the championship, a goal on which he’s obsessively staked everything. But his turbulent friendship with a talented younger teammate, his budding romance with an aspiring gallery director, his lingering grief over his parents’ death, a hostile coach, and a possibly homicidal professor all threaten to distract and derail him. He must also face his demons: a lack of direction, a deep intolerance for boredom, a reckless despair that verges into suicidal ideation, and a loneliness so vast it becomes a potent feature of the dramatic landscape. The student-athlete’s world comes alive with crisp, unflinching prose: “Suicide sprints, jump rope, rope climbing, five times, arms only... I brush the vomit out of my teeth and get my backpack.” Habash also balances his protagonist’s most harrowing episodes and questionable behavior with genuine humor. There are riffs on everything from death to jazz to God to liberal arts degrees. A striking, original, and coarsely poetic portrayal of a young man’s athletic and emotional quest. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Associates.

April 1, 2017
A college wrestler is driven to win, to the detriment of his mental health.The captivating narrator of Habash's debut novel is a sinewy senior at a small North Dakota college on a last-ditch effort to win the Division IV championship in his weight class. To do so, he takes easy-A classes ("Drawing II, Meteorology I, Basic News Writing, and What Is Nothing?") and works out like a fiend ("I'm skin and gristle and little water"). But it's clear early on that something is off. He mentions his childhood as an orphan only to deny its impact, and his macho rhetoric takes bizarre turns: "It's my job to make other people upset and sad," "Everything outside of wrestling is devoid of mystery and deep faith," "Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha." In short, Stephen is a classic unreliable narrator, which makes him as fascinating to experience--Habash plainly glories in his hero's digressions and non sequiturs--as he is difficult to root for. He's a bully with opponents, alienating with his teammates, and clumsy in a budding relationship. Once a meniscus tear threatens to keep him out of competition, his angry, obsessive nature ("I gargle discontent") drives him to investigate dark rumors about coaches and teachers. That's a canny provocation to the reader: recognize he's unhinged or respect his sense of justice? Either way, Habash writes about the raw physicality of wrestling better than anybody this side of John Irving ("I push his far shoulder like I'm crowbarring open Tut's tomb or I'm Lazarus moving aside the rock for the big reunion"), and though the story is overlong given Stephen's straightforward trajectory, the novel's grim, intense mood is admirably sustained. For this well-intentioned but troubled man, every victory is a pyrrhic one. A lively, occasionally harrowing journey into obsession.

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Starred review from April 15, 2017

Stephen Florida wrestles for tiny Oregsburg College in North Dakota. The loss of his parents has left him lonely and guarded. His obsession with wrestling becomes a way of trying to control one of the few things he can, and the hard work he puts toward realizing his desire propels him to a level almost beyond his talents. His only distraction during senior year is Mary Beth, a young woman he meets in art class, who falls for him as hard as he falls for her and who unfortunately leaves for Michigan partway through the year to take a job at a gallery. A late-season knee injury will sideline Stephen until just before the national championship and cause additional concern when he reinjures it before the tournament. VERDICT Habash's debut is a memorable portrait of obsession to the edge of madness and the loneliness that follows so single-minded a pursuit. Yet readers will gladly accompany the complex, thoughtful, not-always-likable Stephen through the season as he battles his own dark fears as much as any opponent.--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2017
It's wrestling season, and this is the last shot at the 133-pound-weight-class championship for senior Stephen Florida, as Oregsburg College knows Steven Forster because of clerical errors he hasn't corrected. Orphaned when his parents died in a car accident, and again when his grandmother, his resulting caretaker, passed away, Stephen doesn't need or want much beyond success on the wrestling mat these days, and he pursues it doggedly. Despite his flinty demeanor, he attracts both sensitive friendship and romantic interest until a knee injury undoes his hopes, and maybe his sanity. Stephen's reliability as a narrator isn't immediately called into question, but when it is, it's in a big way. Combining the darkly psychological athletics of a Megan Abbott novel with the ominous mood of Donnie Darko, Habash's debut is above all his very original own. As a character study, Stephen's is convincingly, comically, realistically weird, his seeming every thought marvelously relayed. This, plus beautiful sentences and an evocative North Dakota setting in the not-so-distant past, mark a promising debut.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)