BECOMING CARLY KLEIN

A YA novel offers a coming-of-age story about life’s uncertainties facing a New York City teenager.

Carly Klein, a high school sophomore, is a smart Jewish girl (she “read the captions to New Yorker cartoons when she was four”) on the verge of becoming an adult in the early 1980s. Yet she is struggling at Baxter, a girls’ school on 79th Street and the East River. She lives with her parents: Gwen, a psychiatrist on staff at Mount Sinai Hospital who counsels patients in her home office, and Joel, who works in a Midtown advertising office. Carly’s best friend, Lauren Lensky, has a French mother (Tibou) and a comfortable, welcoming home—the opposite of her own home. Carly dreams of being Tibou’s daughter and secretly reads her mother’s confidential patient notebooks. Through these notebooks, Daniel Strauss becomes Carly’s favorite patient. Daniel is a “blind junior at Columbia College who majors in music and plays jazz saxophone.” Carly impulsively decides to follow Daniel one night. She also sneaks out to the Downunder Café, where Daniel is playing his saxophone one evening. At the cafe, she sees Edwin, her father’s assistant, with her dad and must face a new reality. Later, posing as a girl named Serena, she becomes a reader for Daniel, which complicates her life further. Harlan’s believable and compelling depiction of Carly’s home life includes a mother becoming absorbed in her work and a father coming out as gay. In this well-crafted tale, the turmoil between her parents results in Carly heading to a camp in Colorado. She doesn’t want to go, so she fights packing and hates the camp once there. Additionally, Harlan’s vivid portrait of Lauren’s loving family provides a rich contrast and an escape for Carly. A minor flaw surfaces in the scene in which Carly follows Daniel. Readers may question: Why isn’t Daniel or his dog aware of her presence? Wouldn’t he or his pooch eventually hear or smell her? But this minor misstep doesn’t spoil an engrossing story.

An engaging tale about family, maturation, and love.