RaveThe Rumpus\"It is with the fullness of Olivia’s life that the novel becomes fullest. Temple backdrops the almost fantastical set with the even more exhilarating minutiae of the human experience ... compact and stylish prose that is quick and concentrated. It moves between short paragraph vignettes to fleshy scenes, the result a thrilling feeling of uneasiness. Her section breaks are so frequent that the novel at times reads as if composed of short flash fiction, and the recurrence of characters and locations then establishes a stop-motion strobe light of the summer ... something can only be light by comparison, and so our touchstone is the body. The body in The Lightness is not just our physicality; instead, it is the multiplicity of our senses combined. Every theme is approached this way, the novel less interested in a singular point of view than the palimpsest that is our lives ... But this isn’t a novel about witchcraft or physics; rather, it’s a novel in which possibility is spellbinding. Temple establishes an uncanniness from the start to suggest the capacity for fantasy. Loaded with facts and memories and retreat and a disappeared father, The Lightness is at times otherworldly. At others, it reminds us that otherworldliness is just our living. The distance we have from the Levitation Center is the very tool through which Temple incites our conviction that a girl can rise.\
