Finny

May 10, 2010
In his impressive debut, Kramon takes on a number of familiar coming-of-age plots—smalltown fish-out-of-water adolescence, frustrated first love, boarding school friendships, big city escapes—and pulls it all off with flair and humor. A 14-year-old misfit in her Maryland hometown, Finny Short is sent to boarding school by her conservative parents soon after acting on a crush on mysterious boy-next-door Earl. At posh Thorndon, she finds an unlikely best friend in Judith, a beautiful heiress who thinks nothing of catching a ride in Peter Jennings's car; together, Earl and Judith prove unexpectedly influential throughout Finny's teenage years, as well as her passage through college. Kramon is at his best sending up Finny's innocence by means of an endearing, Dickensian coterie of side characters like androgynous dorm matron Poplan and Earl's father, a narcoleptic pianist who falls asleep in the middle of performances. Combining snappy dialogue, frank attention to sex, and convincingly detailed characters—eccentric and sympathetic, but not sentimental—Kramon is clearly a find.

March 1, 2010
Life lessons and imperfect love turn teenager Finn into a philosophical adult.

Delphine Short, aka Finny, comes of age slowly in Kramon's quirky debut, a drawn-out story pervaded at times with a flavor of Alice in Wonderland. Growing up in Maryland, Finny falls in love at age 14 with Earl Henckel, the sensitive son of narcoleptic pianist Menalcus. But when Sylvan, Finny's brother, tells her parents of the romance, she is dispatched, Victorian-style, to boarding school, where she befriends hygiene-obsessed dorm matron Poplan and rooms with rich New Yorker Judith. Kramon's taste in quirky minor characters—a screaming headmistress, a sneezing undertaker—lends the story a surreal air, as does the small crew of overlapping principals. Over time, Poplan will marry Menalcus and Sylvan will become Judith's lover. Meanwhile, Earl moves to Paris to be with his mother, and Finny finishes school and goes to college. She and Earl are reunited at one of Judith's parties, and the future looks rosy until Earl hesitates about commitment, a pattern that will be repeated. Finn saves her mother from a con-artist, drifts between jobs and men and, finally, with an air of compromise, achieves her own resolution.

A colorless heroine, flimsy plotting and some sexually explicit moments transmute young adult–oriented material into something more peculiar and less satisfying.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

April 15, 2010
She was christened Delphine, butstrong-minded in this and other things as wellshe chose to call herself Finny, and this is the story of some 20 or so formative years of her life, from age 14 to (roughly) 34. That not all of these years are presented consecutivelyKramon skips over high school and a cluster of years in Finnys twenties and early thirtieslends a not unattractive episodic and even wistful air to this first novel of emotional development, disappointment, and, perhaps, fulfillment. A clutch of eccentric characters evidences Kramons fondness for Dickens, and the frequent allusions to Finnys future (of the years later she would realize sort) salute Dickens sentimentality, as well. For the reader, this invites both a parallel nostalgia for that future and an air of the inevitable to Finnys sometimes unhappy experiences. This mood impacts Kramons characters, too, whose actions sometimes seem more imposed than organic. Not a perfect book, therefore, but one that is suffused with tenderness and the promise of good things for the authors future.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)