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.

“We are what we think.”

WOW. Where to begin? For me, this is an exquisite depiction of teen girl magick and the ephemeral nature of young female bonding. In The Lightness, our group of main characters congregates at a summer retreat to study many different ideas about pursuing spiritual enlightenment, meanwhile becoming wrapped up in this quest to learn how to levitate. Overarching themes of Buddhism and its relation to consumption/desire give texture and depth to what is otherwise an intense hormonal teenage fever dream. The Lightness offers both fantastic character studies and shockingly fresh imagery on every single page. Emily Temple delights with her imaginative wordplay and strategic etymology sprinkled throughout the narration. I love how much of this story revolves around the teasing of the senses. In beautiful synchrony with its themes of air, altitude, and gravity, I noticed frequent changes in my own breathing patterns and mental fog as the reader! In this way, it really feels like the written word transcends time and space. I was entranced most by what Emily Temple had to say about negative space and emptiness, how this pertains to morals, spiritual fulfillment, the physical realm, and beyond. This one is utterly spellbinding and I couldn’t recommend it higher.

The Lightness is a sharp, dark—and darkly funny—examination of girlhood and spirituality. I loved it.

We follow Olivia, the 16 year old daughter of an enigmatic absentee father and passionate, albeit violent, mother. In an attempt to find her father after his sudden disappearance, Olivia enrolls herself in a new-age summer meditation program for troubled young women at the "Levitation Center", the last place he was seen. Or as Olivia calls it, the "Buddhist Boot Camp for Bad Girls." She finds herself immediately swept up in the after-hours "spiritual" activities of a group of young women also in the program.

This read like a suspense novel, full to the brim with foreshadowing and a constant dread of "the end" whatever it may be. The other characters, like her father, are similarly shrouded in mystery and their motivations feel unknowable and often sinister. Olivia herself is also a pretty unreliable narrator, not wanting to let you in on the big secret and only dropping the occasional hint. Overall it made for an intense reading experience in the best of ways.

There are lots of stories threaded throughout the book. They vary quite a bit and many are from Olivia's own childhood slowly illuminating us to her backstory. Most, however, are from mythology. There are lots of Buddhist stories but there are Hindu and Western myths sprinkled in there as well. The stories are told to you, the reader, conversationally and were mostly new to me and incredibly interesting. I mention this not because it has some huge bearing on the plot—though it did definitely add to my enjoyment of the story—but because I know that if I heard this about the book I would be far more likely to pick it up!

I honestly don't know what to make of this one but it's definitely worth a read. Olivia, the narrator, is 16 and she's searching for her father, who she tracks to a meditation center. There are three cliquish girls- Janet, Laurel, and Serena- who convince her that they must levitate and to do so they must convince the gardener to teach them. It's a closed loop environment which builds the pressure on Olivia, in particular. The writing sometimes doubles back on itself; I was forced to reread sentences on occasion. There's bits of Buddhist philosophy and teenage angst in the mix. I found Olivia sympathetic and she was the reason I kept reading. Temple's MFA is in evidence. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. For fans of literary fiction - and this might be a good entry for the YA crowd.

I enjoyed the idea of this book much more than the book itself. I felt there was a big pacing problem and a lack of narrative propulsion, but I liked the setting quite a lot and the use of American Buddhism instead of, for example, a Catholic setting (which is very common in this kind of book.)

Reading this book I couldn't help but think of Family Guy's faux deep take down of "The Godfather," in part because there are a lot of faux deep moments here (so many digressions just to make a faintly clever point!) but also because, you know, this book does tend to insist upon itself. It very much wants to impress its self-awareness on the reader ("that old slog"; the way too many repetitions of "etc"), and to constantly editorialize every single thing that happens. Which, considering that this book is roughly 60% heavy-handed foreshadowing, means that the majority of this book is less story than think piece.

There is just so much telling here! So many winding paragraphs about the force of Serena's/Laurel's/Janet's beauty/personality...but very few of them actually doing anything or proving any of the attributes they're assigned. And in those few scenes it all felt, I'm sorry to say, very paint by the numbers to me: if you've read a ~bad girl group book, you probably already know everything that's going to happen here.

It's a shame because there absolutely were opportunities to make this book a stand out: a stronger focus on each girl's desire to levitate and less time spent on etymology would've gone a long way. And it's not like the writing itself wasn't good: even as annoyed as I was with the way the story was being told I felt that it ran smoothly and didn't have trouble getting through it on the sentence level. But the lack of a story being told made it difficult to appreciate anything the author was trying to do there.

Other readers may find something more to appreciate here; I have no doubt that readers looking for edgier female friendship books will enjoy this. But unfortunately that was not the case for me.

I’m judging a 2020 fiction contest. It’d be generous to call what I’m doing upon my first cursory glance—reading. I also don’t take this task lightly. As a fellow writer and lover of words and books, I took this position—in hopes of being a good literary citizen. My heart aches for all the writers who have a debut at this time. What I can share now is the thing that held my attention and got this book from the perspective pile into the read further pile.

"Teeth are for digestion," she said one morning to Shastri Dominique, who had told her that if she'd just smile, even if she had to force her muscles to comply, her body would respond with positive feelings, a Pavlovian response to the performance of happiness. "Why would I want to show my digestive organs in public?" Janet said. Why would you even want to see them? Don't be disgusting.

As this excerpt captures, I hope, a fun feminist bildungsroman about young women attempting to levitate at a spiritual/culty/ retreat of sorts.

Excellent premise but I found the prose wanting. Not really my cup of tea but I can see it working well for some readers and think it will find its audience.

One of the trickiest lessons I’ve helped to teach budding English majors—apart from initiating them into the mysteries of Boolean operators and the inner workings of databases—is that all narrators are concocting their stories. Some are liars. Some are delusional. Some just want others to like them. Even the ones without obvious motives pick and choose what to tell their audience. I’ve read all kinds of narrators but I don’t think I’ve ever met one quite like Olivia, the narrator of Emily Temple’s debut novel, The Lightness. In the years since the events Olivia recounts, it’s clear that she has spent that time educating herself to make up for her shocking obliviousness and naivete.

The Lightness centers on a summer when Olivia attends a Buddhist/spiritual summer retreat for troubled teenage girls. The camp, known as the Levitation Center, is not just a place for Olivia to find her center and brush up on her meditation skills. It’s also the place where her father disappeared years ago, shortly after divorcing her mother. It’s clear that Olivia always wanted to be close to her father. Unfortunately, her father is more interested in trying to detach himself from all earthly desires instead of bonding with his troubled daughter.

We learn over the course of The Lightness of Olivia’s damaged relationships with her parents but most of the story follows what happened after Olivia started to become involved with a strange, alluring girl named Serena and her tight cadre of friends. Serena is the queen bee of the Levitation Center. She’s basically grown up there. Serena is convinced that she can find a way to levitate, just like the rumored lamas and yogis and monks of the past. Within the spiritual practices of the Levitation Center, Serena appears to have created her own little cult that takes what it wants from Buddhist tradition, while leaving behind the whole profound compassion and enlightenment thing.

Through the adult Olivia’s eyes, we see all of the places where young Olivia could have chosen differently. There were plenty of moments when Olivia could have listened to a less cool girl’s warnings about Serena or when she could have heeded the warnings of her own instincts. Adult Olivia provides thick lashings of foreshadowing as she tells her story. So much so, in fact, that the last few chapters are unbearably tense.

The Lightness is a unique look at the lengths that some unhappy teen-aged girls will go to be something other than who they are, to be special. Serena is willing to court death in her quest for special Buddhist powers, never pausing to consider that she doesn’t know nearly as much as she thinks she does. It was hard for me to not pity Olivia, in spite of her bad decisions. It’s a rare teen girl who doesn’t want to be thin and pretty and popular. What was interesting to me was that, even though she has learned a lot since the summer at the Levitation Center, Olivia still finds her teenage self a mystery. Some readers might not like that The Lightness leaves some things ambiguous. I don’t have a problem with this. Ambiguity leaves room for me to think about all the questions that the novel raises. What does it mean when Westerners appropriate Buddhist traditions? What balance should a practitioner strike between their drive for enlightenment and their terrestrial obligations? Is the heart of a teenager always unknowable?

I would recommend The Lightness to readers who like their fiction erudite and thought-provoking.

Olivia's father went to a Buddhist retreat at the Levitation Center and never returned. Olivia is determined to find her father so she enrolls in the Center's retreat for teen girl's hoping to find any sign of where he may be. When she enters the retreat she becomes obsessed and perhaps enthralled with a group of three girls who are mysterious and set themselves apart from the other girls. As her obsession grows, she is invited into their inner circle.
Temple's ability to write about the rawness of teenage girls in way that will ring true to every woman is quite remarkable. It didn't tread on twee at all but explored the complex psychological games that teen girls play with one another and how dangerous those games can be. The author also utilized Buddist philosophy as a jumping point to question life as we may create it within our minds.
I loved every minute of this book and am so happy this new literary voice has emerged. I will be reading everything puts forth in the future.

I received an ARC of this novel from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

A coming of age novel about a group of young women in a summer Buddhist camp. Through manipulation and scheming, a cluster joins together to accomplish levitation. While learning those arts, the young women become fixated on more carnal desires.

Emily Temple, in her novel The Lightness, set to publish on June 16 from William Morrow, has created a phenomenal debut. This coming-of-age story follows Olivia, a slightly troubled teenager reeling from her beloved father's disappearance a year ago after his attendance at a Buddhist retreat. Following her father's footsteps, Olivia joins a summer program for teenage girls at the same Buddhist meditation center, known colloquially as "The Levitation Center" to try to learn more about her father's disappearance and his latest location.

Stylistically, this novel hit almost all of my boxes. I love an unreliable, older narrator (think The Secret History or The Great Gatsby) recalling a pivotal moment in their early life (that usually involves a murder), a story told in vignettes with breaks in the narrative (this novel includes breaks such as dictionary definitions, memories from before or after the summer, and Buddhist theological musings), stories situated within the wilderness that explore the isolation and fear that comes along with it, as well as stories about teenage girls who help to shape one another into the people they will become, perhaps because of the toxicity of the relationships they form. For that reason, I absolutely loved it, although I am hesitant to say that I believe this novel will work for everyone.

There were a few things that knocked my review down a star, however. The first being that this novel reads very similarly to The Girls (which may or may not be helped by the marketing as this being a novel for fans of Emma Cline), which was particularly interesting to me given that they both attended Middlebury for undergrad. Additionally, I found the thematic elements of beauty and the pain it can cause to be a bit questionable in their emphasis on Olivia's negative descriptions of herself, as well as her mother's art pieces which she calls "The Fatties." I will be curious to see if other reviewers have thoughts on this element of the novel, as I don't entirely know what to think about it myself.

Overall, however, I really enjoyed this debut and I look forward to seeing what Emily Temple does in the future!

Full disclosure: I didn't finish this book. I stopped at 49%. The writing style is not for me: its very romanticized, with asides and nods to an ominous future event. I didn't find characters compelling enough to continue. The book is a big vibe: a sort of Virgin Suicides meets eastern philosophy and flowery prose. I could see some people really gravitating towards this, but not me.

A fantastic debut raw real dark.The teenage girls their emotional involvement desires comes alive.Will be recommending.#netgalley#harpercollins

This was a decent book about the bonds of girlhood; philosophical and religious growth from a child to an adult; and general explorations of the foundations of Buddhism, surprisingly. The book is primarily exposition, describing the scene the people the principles of Buddhism, etc., but there is a also a good amount of narration about Olivia's childhood, her relationship with her mother, her search and yearning for an absent father, and her emerging sexuality.

I didn't especially love any of the characters, or feel connected to them, and could have put the book aside and walked away at many points in the book. It just didn't resonate with me, though I can see, from an objective standpoint, why others may be drawn to the story.

This story was so rich and beautifully told, it made a perfect escapist read during these crazy times, I can't wait to share it.

A beautifully told gem of a story that explores the complex feelings and dynamics of teen girls. The narrator, Olivia, is well-developed and believable, as are her fraught relationships with her parents and friends. The plot is tightly wound and compelling, urging you to turn the pages to find out exactly how Olivia and her thrill-seeking friends' lives will ultimately unravel in one intense summer.

A teen spends a summer at a Buddhist meditation center hoping to find some clue about the whereabouts of her absentee father. She is befriended by an odd trio of girls led by the mysterious Serena who is obsessed with the idea of levitation.

I was initially drawn into the book because of the writing and the "voice" of the main character, but eventually the book seemed to drag on and I found myself struggling to stay engaged.

Olivia is spending the summer at a holistic meditation and wellness retreat for teenage girls. She seems to be an easily corruptible and misguided young woman that might fall in with the wrong crowd. However, as Temple deftly unravels Olivia's story we learn there is more to her than meets the eye. I loved this book, it is Ottessa Moshfegh meets The Craft with a smattering of Donna Tartt. The characters are wonderful, wonderfully drawn that is, they're actually quite horrible people. The story is a real slow burn but manages to be creepy from the out. The sense that something is awry with Olivia and her newfound friends is patently clear from the beginning however the sense of unease and tension blooms as the book goes on and reaches a satisfyingly bizarre and clever climax. As others have also commented the cover art is brilliant and really fits the tone and content of the book. Thank you to NetGalley and to HarperCollins for gifting me a galley of this wonderful book in exchange for an honest review. I feel exceptionally lucky to have had early access to this excellent novel.