Uncommon Education, An: A Novel

Amazon Best Books of the Month, May 2012: A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee for her stories, Elizabeth Percer brings the clarity and sophistication of the short form into her affecting debut novel about a young woman with lessons to learn. When we meet Naomi Feinstein in childhood, she has clumsy if loving parents, an eccentric best friend, and few social graces. Her photographic memory and intense ambition help Naomi chart a path to her dream school, but the relationships she builds there turn out to have far more resonance than the education she imagined. On a campus full of women with strengths and foibles as complicated as her own, she learns when to trust (and distrust) her instincts about both academia and other human beings. Percer’s gift lies in making Naomi--and her family, friends, and lovers--utterly, absorbingly real. An Uncommon Education feels like the kind of all-night conversation that breaks your heart when it ends. --Mia Lipman