Nova

by James Boice

Book Overview

Grayson Donald, seventeen years old, has just hanged himself from a basketball hoop next to a playground in Centreville, North Virginia (NoVA). The question is, Why? In this incisive dissection of the author's hometown, James Boice scratches its shiny suburban surface to reveal a place formed from "a cloud that slid west and met with the humidity and spent buckshot cartridges and Civil War bones clad in blue and gray to create concrete and...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 141657543X
• ISBN13: 9781416575436
• Release Date: May 2011
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Meet Your Neighbors

I bought this book the day it came out as I had been looking forward to it ever since I read Boice's first novel MVP, which despite its theme of professional basketball, was just too good to be true. If you liked MVP, you will love NoVa. If MVP was not to your taste, you will probably not like NoVa either. NoVa takes place in a Northern Virgina subdivision in November 1998. The book opens with the suicide of a teenager from the subdivision and goes off from there about the family, friends, neighbors, classmates, etc. of the suicide victim. This all sounds like a common plot and deriative but there is nothing to compare this book to. Boice has a rare talent and manages to give each character (and there are many) a distinctive and unique voice. In addition to feeling like you know these people, you are made aware of every weird idea, dark thought and secret longing. There is Amy's husband who yearns for a terrorist attack because only then would he feel alive (he only has to wait another three years); there is Tim who organizes a car pool to D.C. and requires each rider to once a week bring vegetables and dip for the morning ride; there are Ed and Mitzy, the obsessive liberals scorned by the flaming right-winger John Donald. Everyone is sort of horrible and they are your neighbors. I have not yet finished this book so I don't know what else awaits me but I know it will be unlike anything I have read before. I love this author.