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May 30, 2016abcDena rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
What a great book! Loner by Teddy Wayne tells the tale of anomic Jewish boy, David Federman. David, 18, socially awkward, heads to Harvard with the hopes of carving out a fresh identity amongst the elites, leaving behind the lonely march of his high school years. One of the first nights on campus, David encounters -- from a distance -- beautiful Veronica Morgan Wells ("VMW"), the daughter of a New York socialite. David pays less and less attention to his budding group of friends as his obsession with VMW grows and he makes a clumsy reach for her by dating her bookish and attainable well-meaning roommate, Sara. I picked this for a few reasons: 1. It's one of the shortest novels currently on my reading list, 192 pages. 2. I'm reading 3-4 other books, so I wanted something I thought was light and quick. It was a quick read because it was too good to put down, but not what I'd call light. 3. The short, punchy title was appealing. 4. I gravitate towards stories set on college campuses. I was at first really put off by the first person perspective. But once I got used to the style, I took on David’s gaze and got lost in the story. Loner definitely has some of the same elements as a thriller. The pacing will be familiar to fans of the genre. But, Loner is not a thriller (nor a teen novel, for that matter). It's adult fiction, the sobering character study of a spot-on stand-in for the emotionally stunted “Y” Generation. Teddy Wayne takes a risk by telling this story almost exclusively from the unreliable narrator's perspective, but a key glances from the other side help paint David not as the fearsome stalker caricature of popular drugstore thrillers, but an excruciatingly lonely boy whose misguided attempts to get close to one person go terribly awry. Love-loved this book.