... electric ... Lucy’s fierce first-person point of view is as confident and fearless as she is on the court; she narrates her story with the immediacy and sharpness of a sports commentator, mixed with the pathos and wisdom of a perceptive adolescent charting the perils of her senior year of high school ... Czapnik... captures nostalgia — for both a vanishing New York and Lucy’s evaporating childhood — with the lucidity of a V.R. headset ... Reader, beware: Spending time with Lucy is unapologetic fun, and heartbreak, and awe as well.
... electrifying ... a frank, bittersweet coming-of-age story that crackles with raw adolescent energy, fresh-cut prose, and a kinetic sense of place ... And Czapnik, a seasoned sportswriter, has written exactly the book that every smart, strange, wonderful teenage weirdo like Lucy deserves.
Here's a sentence of critical praise I never expected to utter: The descriptions of basketball games in this novel are riveting ... Lucy's sweaty, all-in passion for basketball, which Czapnik captures so vividly in The Falconer, gives me a sharp sense of what I missed out on ... In The Falconer, Dana Czapnik displays this same gift: In bringing Lucy to life, she sees the whole game.
With prose that mimics Lucy’s athletic skills — at times muscular, at others poetic — author Dana Czapnik glides between biting wit and philosophical musings on the nature of love and being. The book delivers on poignant wisdoms about growing up reminiscent of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye ... in many ways, The Falconer serves as a gentle amendment to [The Catcher in the Rye], probing the possibilities of womanhood and belonging ... Where the book blunders belonging is its forced kinship across race and class ... Despite these tone-deaf moments, the book builds up to an engaging differánce underneath the surface ... The beauty of the book is its performance of withholding — its replication of the waiting room that is teendom and the gilded cage of reminiscence.
... the book is filled with highly caffeinated badass riffs on Manhattan's scenery and soul, on feminism and art, on Lucy's generation, and on basketball itself ... After all the books we've read about horny, frustrated adolescent boys, it's nice to get a different perspective.
You can try, but you’re unlikely to find descriptions of basketball as elegant as those in Dana Czapnik’s debut novel, The Falconer ... There’s little plot here, and Czapnik’s characters tend to make speeches, but The Falconer offers astute observations on the difficulties women confront when trying to succeed in male-dominated fields. In Lucy, Czapnik has created a great character who refuses to conform to expectations.
Readers will enjoy the vivid rendering of 1993 New York and this unique coming-of-age story told through the fresh and likeable voice of Lucy (Loose) Adler ... Lucy is a remarkable character, filled not only with knowledge about her favorite sport, basketball, but with an innate and earnest curiosity about the differences between herself and the girls she views as pretty, surmising how vastly different they are compared to her and her way of thinking ... This is a rare coming-of-age story so richly told and wholly captivating that Czapnik may in time find herself held up and used as the example of what fine literary writing is all about.
Czapnik’s prose is fast-paced and often intriguing ... The streetscapes of Manhattan are rendered skilfully. Czapnik also captures the inner voice of an American teenager so convincingly, including the melodramatic love-sickness and chronic wallowing, that, much like the real thing, it can be grating ... But the plot is non-existent. The few experiences our narrator has within her conventional white middle-class bubble are unremarkable, which she admits to herself towards the end ... The male characters don’t deviate far from stereotypes, either, and Lucy’s dad, a civil rights lawyer who seems a decent and caring alternative to the 'assholes' his daughter encounters, is strangely muted ... Although the book reads a lot like young-adult fiction, its emotional bite comes from the sad realisation that most of the societal limitations Lucy faces as a female in the 1990s are still around.
Lucy’s first-person narration kept me hooked. At least for a little while ... But then Lucy began to falter. She started to become not uninteresting, but inconsistent with herself, which is far worse ... [Czapnik 's] prose is varied and written in a very readable way ... when the book ends and I still don’t know who Lucy is, I don’t consider it a good thing. In spite of all this, I wouldn’t say that Lucy doesn’t have her moments, and The Falconer is a solid read because of that ... But as a celebration and a critique of life, love, and what it is to be a woman and a person on planet Earth, this book has a lot to say, all of which Czapnik says with a deftness and uniqueness I’ve not seen much elsewhere.
The writing in Czapnik's debut is sparkling throughout; her background as a sports journalist shines in the basketball passages ... Coming-of-age in Manhattan may not have been done this brilliantly since Catcher in the Rye. That comparison has been made before, but this time, it's true. Get ready to fall in love.
... flawed ... Lucy spends most of the book wandering around Manhattan, giving her story a plotless feel. And Lucy and her friends sound way too mature and savvy for their teenage years ... Despite a lived-in sense of place, this coming-of-age novel seems to be about jaded young characters who have already come of age, leaving them—and the reader—with little room for emotional development.
