A delightfully uncomfortable book about female friendship, loss, and love. This one will stick with me for a while.

Though I’m very late to reviewing this one, I really enjoyed it! It kept me interested, and I would recommend it to anyone who dabbles in this genre.

It''s delightful to read this book if for no other reason than Temple's prodigious gift of the English language, and her ability to capture the beauty and terror of young women--or, perhaps, girls--and their sexuality, and the visceral way we are beginning to see them and understand them as complex people and at times those who can act out some intense horrors hard for any of us to stomach. Think Megan Abbott mixed with Nabokov, and perhaps some other books whose writers I can't think of, some Eastern philosophy thrown in, and the beautiful dread of it all. Temple is a gifted and lyrical writer and I look forward to seeing what she will write next!

Emily Temple trains a keen eye on female friendship and body, womanhood, and adolescent desire in this stunning debut. Precise prose, dark humor, and masterfully suspenseful — it had me hooked until its end.

Unfortunately, this is a story that just didn't work for me - Troubled teen girls at a Buddhist retreat. I abandoned it at the 30% mark on my Kindle. Perhaps younger readers might enjoy it more.

Thank you to NetGalley for this copy!

“Of course: a vanishing preceded by a goodbye is no vanishing at all, though it can be just as incomprehensible.”


The synopsis of this book intrigued me, and I was hooked initially, but then I felt as if it went a bit off the rails. The story seemed to be about one thing - a daughter searching for her father after he disappears - and quickly becomes many other things. Because there is so much to focus on, I felt as if the main story got swept under the rug and we never learned much about it again. Too much was trying to be done all at once with no resolution for a lot of it. I was into it when the story shifted to one of a cult-like environment, and it gave me a bit of a The Virgin Suicides vibe at times but this also went seemingly nowhere. I wanted to suspend my belief right along with Olivia, and even that was deflated by the ending the whole thing was given. I really did like the way that Temple wrote this, and how the novel was set up, I just think she tried to do too much at once and did not succeed fully.

Fans of The Girls and John Greene's writing will enjoy this book. The story wasn't for me, and admittedly I didn't finish, but I can see how others would love the world Temple created.

Thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins Publishers - William Morrow for this e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

This coming of age book is about a young woman going to a "spiritual" camp in order to figure out where/why her father disappeared a year before when he went to the same retreat. The writing style was good and the story was somewhat interesting but I was a tad bit bored up until the end. I must say, I did like how it ended and the questions that were left but I was ultimately left unsatisfied.

I absolutely love the cover though and feel it depicts the book very well. I think this book just isn't my type of New Adult I like BUT I'm sure there are others that would like this style of storytelling.

3/5

Thank you to Netgalley and Emily Temple for my copy by of The Lightness, for an honest review. I honestly don’t know what I was expecting from this book, but it fell flat for me. It seemed like it was going to be bold, a literary work to rival others. But to be honest it seemed like the strangest, book I have read in some time. Olivia, 16 years old, runs away from her mother. Which is odd because she used her mom’s credit card to go to this Buddhist camp and her mother never looks for her. She is running away from problems though, running away from feelings. Her father has disappeared from her life. Her mom is a free spirit, better at creating “art” and throwing parties than being a mom. Olivia meets up with three other campers. Janet, athletic, Laurel, who seems sexual and Serena, who seems to be an original mean girl. This group of woman want to reach the ultimate goal of this boot camp and levitate. In their attempt to levitate, the girls reach out to an older man who causes more problems than he is worth. The rest of the story is focused on back history of Olivia, which is pretty good, the writing is done very well and the girls attempt to levitate and the issues that arise from this goal. I really feel this story could have been so much more. It was in fact a 3 star read for me. I have recommended to a few people that I know might like this type of book. For a first book I do give the author credit for a book that mAde me think and I would read a second book. I just wish this wasn’t so superficial. This is just my opinion though and look forward to reading other reviews. I have posted this on my Instagram page. See my review on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

An eerie, atmospheric, immersive read—I was compelled by the characters and their dynamics, and will be interested to read more from Temple in future.

And yes, it's kinda sorta like A Secret History at summer camp, but also... not.
Blah Blah Blah teen girls are mean blah blah, but it's not just that.

Also, she quoted Broken Social Scene in, like, the second chapter so....

Unfortunately this was a DNF for me at about 30%. I think the plot was very interesting, but the pacing of the story was jarring and I didn’t feel much of a flow to the writing style. Often there were sentences and paragraphs void of substance, which I think could have been edited out for a shorter book, or to give space for more character & plot development.

Many years ago, I submitted to a writing workshop a piece about a young woman in a small town in Southern India in the early 20th century. In the hall before class the night we were to workshop the piece, I ran into a fellow student, a smart and careful reader and a talented writer. She was the only Indian American in the class, and I knew that she’d spent months at a time in India visiting extended family. That night, she gave me one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received about my writing when she said, somewhat self-consciously, “I tried to hate it.” She tried, but she didn’t.

I thought of my friend’s confession frequently as I read The Lightness by Emily Temple, a retrospective coming-of-age story of 16-year-old Olivia, who runs away to a Buddhist summer camp for troubled girls, in part to look for her father, who was last seen there years earlier. Olivia falls in with a trio of friends trying with typical teen intensity to learn to levitate, and the novel casts the girls’ passions and identity-making in a Buddhist light.

I’ve practiced Buddhism in the Therevada tradition – the strain from which Westerns have extracted “mindfulness” – for two decades, including about 250 days in silent retreat, and I can be un-Buddhist-ly defensive when it’s misrepresented. Many years ago, when I told a colleague I was a Buddhist he quipped, knowingly, that the central tenet is “Life is pain.” Buddhism according to “The Princess Bride,” I retorted, but it wasn’t funny to me. The first time I heard the dharma, the Buddhist teachings, I remember thinking, Finally, someone is telling the truth around here. I had found a subtle but sublime set of teachings which, it was clear from my first exposure, had the potential to transform me into a more contented version of myself. I still feel protective of those teachings – as if they need me to protect them – so, when I read Sarah Gerard’s review of The Lightness by Emily Temple (William Morrow, pub 6/16/20) calling it “a beautiful meditation on meditation, with readings of sacred texts and light Buddhist history,” I was intrigued. I am not a hater, as the LA expression goes – I don’t typically read to sneer – but I found it impossible to enter the novel open-minded. I admit, self-consciously, that I tried to hate it.

Most of the Buddhism in The Lightness is Tibetan, a form from the Mahayana tradition, which split from Therevada two thousand years ago. Rinpoches, sand mandalas, Kyudo, Ikebana, and the Shambala Institute all make appearances. I have little experience with these cultural aspects of Mahayana, but the novel’s deeper treatment of Buddhism resonated. For instance, I related to Olivia’s description of the effect on her father of intensive retreat: “He always seemed different to me in the days following his return: there was a new delicate rawness there, a lingering sense of sublimation, as if his external layers had been steamed loose and peeled away. After a while, they would grow back. A while after that, he’d leave again.” Later, she invokes a common metaphor for the inherent unreality of identity when, after being disillusioned with her friend, she says, “I can liken it only to the moment when, during a climactic scene in a film you’re watching in the theater – perhaps it’s a horror, perhaps a romance – you notice, for an instant, the texture of the screen itself.” Even emptiness, that notoriously slippery subject, is presented in a robust way.

One of the novel’s central concerns is craving, a concern at the intersection of all Buddhist traditions. Olivia, and Temple, are transparent about the intensity of teen desire and the undercurrent of violence that accompanies such passion. Temple’s characters will do whatever it takes to get what they want, and Olivia is intermittently aware of the liberating alternative to being caught in craving. Through much of the novel, we are suspended between wanting’s two valences: the fist of desire that prevents contentment, and the sweet longing that propels us to freedom.

Temple never rejects Buddhism (although Olivia does, at times), but neither does she romanticize the West’s version of it. I loved Olivia’s comment on American Buddhists: “I’ve seen a pattern. Upper-middle-class white people, looking for meaning. Looking to hook themselves to someone else’s old magic.” Harsh, but she’s got a point.

I wasn’t always convinced that Olivia had a strong grasp of Buddhism. But she isn’t supposed to. She is not a reliable narrator, as she herself will tell you (perhaps a bit too often), or a particularly enlightened one. Even at the retrospective distance of early adulthood from which she tells this story, she waffles between rejecting religion outright and gravitating back to the lure of emptiness and mystery. What mattered to me was not whether Olivia got the dharma, but whether Temple did. And by the end, she had convinced me.

The key to Temple’s success, I think, is that she never shies away from ambiguity. Several of the characters are left ambivalent, most notably the twenty-something heartthrob Luke, who may or may not be taking advantage of the girls’ innocence. Olivia’s thinking waffles constantly, with much negative capability, as when she muses about her missing father: “Here’s a version: my father loved me. He just loved his religion more. And here’s a version: he was right. He made the right choice.” With each new epiphany, intimacy, and betrayal, Olivia, both the teen and the older narrator, pulls us into her view-of-the-moment. We get a good dose of Olivia’s rejection of Buddhism – the cliched “religion has done more harm than good” – so that when she does an about-face, we feel the longing, the questioning, the indecision. Olivia doesn’t know what the truth is, and that is exactly the right place to be.

The novel’s end is beautifully ambiguous, and in my view, utterly successful. In the closing scene, the reader is at liberty to choose what’s true. As in practice, as in life, we are left a bit in the dark, having to peer closely to decide what is real.

Buddhist Mean Girls. A Buddhist retreat camp brings together a group of teenage girls who try to find the secret to Levitation. A chunky gardener is included to show them the way. I enjoyed the side storytelling of sleeping beauty and the various literary and religious references. The backgrounds of some of the girls wasn't provided and their individual needs were somewhat clinched. Overall, the story was original and well written in parts.


Copy provided by the publisher and NetGalley

Not a bad story, but definitely wasn't for me. Unfortunately this seemed like another case of "I really wish this wouldn't have been portrayed as __________ meets _______."

I was so intrigued by this book and especially by the comparisons to Donna Tartt, but I'm afraid it did not live up to the hype. I enjoyed aspects of the writing and the initial premise was promising, but the unfolding of the plot and the eventual climax was pondering and disappointing. I wanted to feel the tension building, but it all played out predictably. I also became increasingly annoyed by the narrator's habit of issuing vague comments about the events "well you might have suspected that, or maybe not." There's not enough happening for me to suspect anything or not!

I am a big fan of Emily's work on Lit Hub and now I am a big fan of her first novel. I liked the sly sense of humor, often in parenthetical clauses, and the way the characters developed in my mind. The writing was precise and the plot caught me.

This was such a unique story with a writing style I really loved. I found myself highlighting so many passages. This book was filled with great one-liners. The vibe of the story reminded me of The Grace Year or The Secret History, where there is a group of friends who are morally gray and the overall tone is unsettling and intriguing. The story was addictive, but I can't say I was completely satisfied with the ending....I wanted more explanation or more closure to the story, though I do not know exactly how that could have been accomplished.

We’re all searching for something. The problem is that we don’t always know what that something is.

Our quests for understanding – internal, external or both – aren’t always defined solely by ourselves. Oftentimes, particularly when we’re young, our personal journeys toward knowledge are unduly influenced by the people and places with which our lives are entangled. What we seek becomes conflated and even replaced by the pursuits of those close to us – sometimes without our even knowing that it is happening.

This confusing, convoluted search is central to “The Lightness,” the debut novel from Literary Hub editor Emily Temple. It’s a fractured, fascinating look at a teenage girl’s pursuit of understanding – understanding of her circumstances and understanding of herself. Structurally daring and prosaically deft, the narrative moves back and forth across time (though all is past from the perspective of our frank and forthright narrator), capturing the fluidity and futility of memory.

It’s also a story of the complex sociological minefield that is friendship between teenaged girls, delving into the eggshell-stepping delicacy that can come from the deep and not always fully conscious desire to connect with those who may or may not have your best interest at heart … and are perfectly willing to co-opt your journey in order to advance along their own.

Olivia has arrived at the high-altitude, high-concept meditation retreat known locally as The Levitation Center with an agenda. Yes, she is interested in the scattershot Buddhism-centric Eastern teachings of the facility – particularly the rumored lessons that led to the place’s nickname. But she’s also here to try and learn the fate of her father, a man who had attended the retreat last summer and never returned.

The particular program with which she has engaged is aimed specifically at troubled teen girls. Olivia is one of a score or so of girls, each of whom is here for reasons that range from progressive to punitive. She is soon drawn to a mysterious trio of young ladies who don’t seem to be beholden to the same rules as the rest of them. There’s the athletic, abrasive Janet. There’s the model-beautiful, gossipy Laurel. And then there’s Serena, the enigmatic leader of the trio, a veteran of the center and the one most committed to achieving levitation through whatever means necessary.

Despite the warnings of some of the other girls, Olivia allows herself to be pulled in by Serena’s magnetism, even as she continues to unpack her feelings about her father’s mysterious disappearance. Meanwhile, her daily work detail puts her in the garden, working alongside Luke, whose charm, good looks and enlightened reputation make him an object of much fascination among the girls – and Olivia’s proximity to him inspires more than a few tinges of jealousy.

But as Olivia learns more about her new friends, she realizes that there is still so much more for her to know – not all of it good. The difficulties inherent to her relationship to her manic sculptor mother and her spiritually secretive father spill into her understanding of herself, while Serena’s increasingly strange and obsessive quest to levitate leads her down some questionable paths – paths whose endpoint might well prove tragic.

“The Lightness” walks an interesting tightrope, a coming-of-age story that deftly introduces elements of literary thriller into the mix. There’s a delicacy to the manner in which things unfurl that is really quite striking. The relationships that Temple creates for Olivia are compelling – particularly when you take into account the whiff of unreliability surrounding her narration; even her occasional direct addresses to her audience read as somehow performative. Viewing her world through that backwards-looking lens of loss is engaging as hell, drawing into sharp focus her desire to connect even as we question the fullness of her truth.

A clear point of comparison that has been made by a number of reviewers is Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History” – and it is an undeniably apt one. The truth is that this sort of dessert-first storytelling is a dangerous game, one that can undermine a narrative’s impact significantly. It’s a bold choice that Temple executes well enough that even with an extant sense of the ending, she still finds ways to surprise us.

In a way, Temple has crafted a kind of metaphysical “Mean Girls,” one where we’re aware of Regina George’s ultimate fate from the onset. This notion of the power imbalances and transactional tendencies that come part and parcel with fraught female friendships bears a real universality; Temple has captured the desperate sadness and the giddy mania that comes with surrendering to that desire for inclusion.

This is a story about searching and its consequences. That quest for meaning – meaning that we may not understand or even want – in many ways defines the quester; any road to enlightenment worth traveling will be rocky. Some questions are not meant to be answered, while others should never be asked. At its heart, “The Lightness” is about a young woman for whom those questions are ultimately everything.

I received an arc of this book from net galley in trade for a honest and unbiased review, and i shall do that.

To be completely honest, it’s very hard to summarize this book. Not only did this have a slow start but it was hard to get in to. A little after that, it was one of the most different books i’ve ever read.

Not only is the story odd in weird ways, it is very twisted. One thing, i will say is that this story is not a “light” read as there are so many things to it

This book was not my cup of tea, however, i can tell many people will love it that like these type of stories.