No topic is taboo in Avigayl Sharp's irreverent, cutting debut novel, Offseason. The unnamed narrator is a 28-year-old Ph.D. dropout prone to verbal and physical vomiting. She shares her often stimulant-fueled thoughts, including her obsession with Joseph Stalin and musings on pedophilia, with whomever is nearby. This includes the teenage students at the New England boarding school where she's been hired as a temporary replacement for an English teacher.
The novel, in which plot is far from the primary concern, is contained within the school year. What drives Offseason forward are the narrator's swerves, evasions, and digressions about trauma. She likes to tell new acquaintances about her mother's family's Holocaust tragedy, as well as how her mother told her to get rid of her virginity with "a doorman," which eventually led to a date rape that churns within the narrator's psyche. The narrator isn't the only one prone to long, spooling intimate confessions to strangers; throughout the novel, almost every person she encounters does the same, including her students and the person sitting next to her on a plane. While so much is being said, there's a subtle obliqueness in what's left unsaid--for example, what happened with the person she left behind when she dropped out of grad school and moved into her parents' house in the Midwest before taking the coastal teaching job. On a video call with him, she "can't describe [his face] further. It meant too much."
Offseason is a darkly comic tale with a narrator who's a cross between Gail Honeyman's Eleanor Oliphant and Hannah Horvath, the protagonist of Lena Dunham's Girls. --Nina Semczuk, writer, editor, and illustrator