If you have any interest in joy-reading, then run out today and pick up Now Is Not the Time to Panic, the latest glorious novel from Kevin Wilson ... Frankie’s voice is so clear and compelling, her inner life so well-drawn, that I don’t doubt her existence for a second ... I was hooked,...adult Frankie’s voice is just as compelling as her teen voice.
... obsessively nostalgic ... Frankie and Zeke exult in their profundity, but the real triumph here is Wilson’s. With what pure awe Now Is Not the Time to Panic captures the adolescent thrill of creation — a thrill beyond all reason, but no less powerful and transformative. Although Wilson never mocks these young artists, he doesn’t obscure their naivete either ... This story is much more likely to break your heart than your funny bone. Wilson is witty, to be sure, and he has a firm grip on the absurdity of domestic life, particularly families and their strange, terrarium-like realms. But if there’s comedy here, it’s steeped in melancholy ... plumbs both the intensity of an early creative experience and the strange way such experiences get preserved in the amber of our minds. The result is another tender, moving novel by an author who understands how truly bizarre ordinary life is.
A book destined to become a cult classic, if not just a classic, period ... Compelling...Wilson digs deep ... Frankie and Zeke are wholly original characters, their lives painful and true, and while this is a novel you can read in a single sitting, it is best devoured slowly, a treat for the heart and mind.
Wilson’s mission turns out to be outwitting the trauma-plot trap, and doing that with antic energy. In story after story, he takes what would seem like key ingredients for claustrophobia —damaged characters prone to rumination, flashbacks, and inertia—and whips up something utterly inventive and outward-looking. As if he’s never fully outgrown the hyper-self-consciousness and melodramatic aspirations of adolescence, Wilson’s fiction will have you laughing so much that you’re not prepared for the gut punch that follows ... Wilson’s protagonists aren’t scratched records, doomed to replay past terrors for the rest of their lives. They are quirky, fleshed-out figures who seize on second chances to find purpose and connection—often through creative means. Now Is Not the Time to Panic is the heartfelt culmination of many years (and many pages) spent probing the tension between the urge to make a mark on the world and the costs of doing so—and the push-pull between art’s disorienting and generative powers ... Wilson’s witty depiction of a country obsessed with this bizarre contagion—and determined to cash in on it—doubles as a compelling portrait of anxiety ... As teens, Frankie and Zeke naively enacted lofty debates about art, which Wilson captures in pitch-perfect ways ... Like the offbeat figures he writes about, he is caught up in a repetitive cycle of processing difficult events on the page: His fiction is like a set of nesting dolls, the themes and preoccupations of one story feeding into the next, alike in their contours but wonderfully unique in their particulars. If that sounds like a writer in a rut, go read Wilson’s books. You’ll discover one-of-a-kind worlds opening up.
Nostalgic ... It covers well-traveled arty-girl-meets-arty-boy territory, yet is so heartbreakingly honest at times, with an 'us against the world' feel and punk rock spirit, that it’s easy to jump on board ... What Wilson so eloquently captures is that unique time in one’s life when one small gesture of artistic self-expression — a madcap sentence about living on the fringes and embracing your eccentricities, come what may — really does have the power to change the world, or at least your perception of it.
A buoyant tribute to small-town life, a book about creativity and creation in a world before 'send' buttons ... Wilson adeptly evokes what it was like to be a creative kid in the 1990s ... Wilson shines when detailing the domino effect and the dissemination of images before social media ... Now Is Not the Time to Panic reads like a movie. By which I don’t mean 'cinematic,' I mean like a movie. Strings of dialogue, more predictable than verisimilar, are linked with episodes of brief action ... Here is a charming story with enough pockets of pathos to keep the novel from feeling weightless. The only issue is that it seems to want more for itself. A lot more. And it becomes increasingly vocal about asking for it ... The grand themes (art, friendship, memory) sit like Vaseline on the surface of a pool, with repetition too often standing in for insight ... Implausible ... The novel becomes dominated by the author’s valiant attempts to make a case for adult Frankie’s conundrum, for her poster-adjacent compulsions. But our heroine did not commit an act of political terrorism ... If you focus on...the more sentimental aspects of Now Is Not the Time to Panic, if you take it as a spirited PG-13 tale of summer mischief, you’ll enjoy yourself. But this is not [a] high-stakes or interior evocation of storytelling, friendship and ambition.
... witty and charming ... In this lighthearted examination of teenage tomfoolery, identity and the power of art, Kevin Wilson has created a wonderful protagonist in Frankie Budge, as a teenager and adult. In Frankie, he captures teenage angst and impetuousness, and a woman scarred by the follies of her youth ... Like the cryptic poster, Kevin Wilson’s quirky novel empowers the reader. Beneath its amiable veneer, Now Is Not The Time to Panic is more than a novel about a high school prank. It inspires the reader to take art seriously. Wilson pokes fun at a society swept up into a media frenzy over nothing at all. Finally, through his wonderful, complex characters, he underscores how people allow one minuscule incident to haunt them, altering the path of their lives. And how it requires immense courage to ultimately break free.
As in Kevin Wilson’s other novels, the book is peopled with indelible, often hilarious, characters, including Frankie’s brothers, who are huge, destructive triplets, and her recently divorced, distracted mother. Wilson renders adolescence perfectly: that intense time of absolute certainty, painful insecurity, and the passionate pursuit of vague, inarticulate dreams. Highly recommended.
An earnest exploration of adolescence and the power of art to change lives ... Wilson...has created in Frankie and Zeke — two quirky, appealing characters who can barely contain their own combustible blend of teenage omnipotence and despair ... The novel wobbles a little when Wilson is tasked with writing grown-up Frankie, who acts and sounds a lot like her junk food-loving younger self, but, overall, he has written a seductive, highly imaginative story that testifies to the transformative power of art.
... witty ... Wilson presents a layered work that incorporates many themes into its deceptively simple story, including the ways in which works of art can be easily misinterpreted and the hysteria that sometimes passes for news reporting ... As this novel illuminates, art can be transformative--but who and what it transforms are unpredictable.
... this narrator’s dilemma is not only less dramatic than her teen self’s story, it is also less believable. Would a reporter’s call really have evoked such panic in a grown woman? The voice also distances the reader and deprives the book of the immediacy of, say, Wilson’s Nothing to See Here ... Luckily the bulk of this book is the younger Frankie’s tale, in which Wilson so beautifully depicts the joy of self-discovery ... If, inevitably, this denouement feels like a bit of a letdown, lacking the intensity of the adolescent drama, it doesn’t detract from the real delight to be found in Now Is Not the Time to Panic. While this fourth outing is flawed, it still rings with much of the visceral freshness of his earlier books and says something about art as well. To steal from Holzer, In a dream I read a Kevin Wilson novel, and I was filled with joy.
It’s a clever, if farfetched, premise that entertainingly explores the fallout of subversive art ... But the writing evinces a regression I find worrisome. Frankie retells events decades later, after a journalist uncovers the truth of what happened. But though she’s grown up, her narration is marked by teen-fiction preciousness—crying jags, roller-coaster emotions and prose with the breathlessly juvenile habit of beginning every sentence with 'And . . . And . . . And . . .' There is, unfortunately, a market niche for adult-targeted novels with YA sensibilities. But I think Mr. Wilson is too talented a writer to settle for filling it.
Tender, darkly comic ... Wilson occupies a unique niche in literature. He is a master of creating indelibly peculiar characters with odd passions and traits ... All those peccadillos have a purpose, though. They give shape to the characters’ humanity and fuel narrative arcs that tell evocative tragicomic stories about family, friendship, love and art that end on a note of cautious optimism.
He’s produced perhaps his most emotionally nuanced and profoundly empathetic novel yet ... Wilson meaningfully crafts formed characters, allowing his work to register as a universal document of teenage turmoil as blessedly compassionate as it is cunning ... Highly recommended as a sincere, sometimes brutal, but always sturdy study of the burden of both art and adolescence and a wonderfully evocative treatise on how we imprint ourselves on the world and learn to survive in that tumultuous wake.
Kevin Wilson once again deploys his customary humorous, off-center storytelling to artfully delve into deeper matters ... In the end, Wilson’s deceptively transparent prose, with a touch of humor, a dash of satire and a good bit of insight, carries the reader to a humane and satisfying conclusion.
Wilson has developed a story that is a precise capture of adolescence and of two vibrant teens whose everyday dilemmas, weaknesses, and triumphs are utterly endearing. If the denouement feels a little pat, it is more than made up for by the crisp dialogue and the zipping story line that takes us there.
Now is Not the Time to Panic. is sweet but never saccharine, and honest without ever being cruel to its characters. With such a keen understanding of and patience for Frankie and Zeke, and the adults they grow into, Wilson has penned another winner. Theirs is a moving, lovely, at times very funny, and totally unforgettable story of deep secrets, wild expression and love of all kinds.
I’m curious about Wilson’s decision, as a man, to write from the perspective of a teenage girl rather than a boy. Having gone through teenage girlhood myself, Wilson’s Frankie character was not particularly convincing ... could have used more attention to the plot rather than trying to needlessly come to conclusions that could have just flowed naturally if the story itself stood on its own two legs ... the novel itself seems full of half-baked ideas with plot points that seem extraneous at best and often very out of place. As many issues as I had with the novel, I enjoyed the anticipation of what might happen next. I may not have been happy with the ending and wished for more, but Wilson’s portrayal of American teenagehood was nostalgic and kept me interested enough to get to the last page.
The irrepressible Wilson presents a grunge-era fable about a pre-internet mass-hysteria incident and the alchemy of art ... Family dramas and short stories are the author’s sweet spots, but for this emotionally acute peek into the inner life of the artist, he’s turned to the uncomfortable exile of adolescence ... A warm, witty two-hander that sidesteps the clichés of art school and indie film and treats its free spirits with respect.
Delightful ... Wilson ably captures Frankie and her peers’ adolescent confusion and the creative power of like-minded teens, and his coming-of-age story is ripe with wisdom about what art means in the modern age. It adds up to a surprisingly touching time capsule of youth in the ’90s.
This is a quick read but hardly a simple one. It presents big ideas and asks readers to do the heavy introspective work of mulling them over ... has some compelling themes: creativity, devotion, family dysfunction, adolescent life and love, and mental illness. Nostalgia’s in there too, complete with references fellow ’90s kids will appreciate ... The 'fugitives' phrase Frankie adds to the poster comes from Wilson’s own life as a college student in the 1990s; it was fed to him by a friend, as he explains in an author’s note. We hear it a lot in the book — like, a lot a lot. Eventually — too late, I’d argue — it’s referred to simply as “the phrase.” While it’s used to build tension (which it does, up to a point), we’re not given much of a payoff. Instead, we’re left with more questions: What makes someone a bad person? Can we control how others construe our work? Where does collaboration end and coercion begin? If you’re free, can anything truly hurt you? ... If these are the sort of matters that plague you, too, then read this novel. But do it with a friend or in a book club. Believe me, in our 'post-pandemic' world, you won’t want to endure it alone.
