Euphoria

A powerful opening, and it just kept getting better. It was exquisite from the first page, and upon finishing I wanted to start right back on it to enjoy the writing without the suspense and to spend more time with the characters.

Smart, competent characters; a loathsome villain; believable relationships among them. Sex positivity. Thoughtful exploration of cultural norms (maybe a tad heavyhanded, but forgivably so). Constant addressing of the difficulty of communicating. Strong female roles. Frank no-BS treatment of grief, suicide, loneliness. Science positivity, with genuine-feeling depiction of the euphoria of learning. Basically, a lot of my hot buttons in one tidy package.

Masterful writing: King uses dialog effectively, with the shortcuts, collisions, topic shifts that make up realistic conversations. She gives us sensitive insights into the characters' head spaces. There's one narrative element I found brilliant: after the first (third-person omniscient) chapter, the story shifts to first-person. The smitten male narrator describes glances and unspoken subtexts that suggest his attraction is mutual, and the reader becomes increasingly uncomfortable about the narrator's reliability—we men do have an unsettling tendency to misinterpret attention from women. King eventually addresses this tension, but read for yourself to learn how.

One of the few times I wished a book was longer, not because it was well-written, but because it seemed like it ended just as I was starting to get into the story and the characters. It's said to be loosely based on Margaret Mead, but I don't know enough about her to compare the events in this book to those in her life.