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AN UNCOMMON EDUCATION

Elizabeth Percer

The novel is a beautifully rendered cross between Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep and Dead Poets Society.

After suffering a great loss as a young girl, Naomi Feinstein spends the remainder of her youth preparing single-mindedly for a prestigious future in medicine. She enters the venerable women's college Wellesley with her determination intact, but finds herself consumed by loneliness and competition where she had expected solidarity and security. Before long she discovers the Shakespeare Society, an underground group of passionate women, and is finally able to find her place even as new enigmas unfold. Over the course of the novel, she will try and fail to save three people she loves, until she can accept the grace of human limitations. AN UNCOMMON EDUCATION is about a young woman's quest for greatness, only to learn that it is a false anchor, and that the best we can hope for is to connect meaningfully with those we love. The novel illustrates how so many of us develop the mistaken desire to surpass our messy, undefined, and brief lives rather than simply live them. Elizabeth Percer is a poet and recovering academic. Her poetry has been published widely and has been twice honored by the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation and nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. She received a B.A. in English from Wellesley, a Ph.D. in arts education from Stanford University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship for the National Writing Project at Berkeley.

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Book Published 2012-05-01 by HarperCollins

Comments

Poet Percer's fiction debut is an intimate portrait of an intelligent, tender girl with a deep wish to protect those she loves.

“It’s impossible not to care about Naomi Feinstein, a smart, sometimes lonely girl searching for her own life and a way to keep the people she loves safe. An Uncommon Education beautifully answers these questions by bringing Naomi to the Bard (the play’s the thing), but also gives the reader something much rarer—a world, and a life, that seem real.”

Naomi’s description of her early adolescence is enticing and shyly perceptive.

A fine novel and a young writer to watch.

Three-time Pushcart nominee Percer offers an uncommonly good debut that’s finely detailed and emotionally gripping while avoiding every pitfall of the standard coming-of-age tale. Highly recommended.

"A moving and bittersweet coming-of-age story about love, loss, friendship, ambition, and the power of memory. This complex and satisfying tale introduces a cast of quirky, hilarious, intellectual young women, struggling to find their place in the world."

Percer’s lyrical novel has much to offer.

“Haunting and poignant, Elizabeth Percer’s coming-of-age novel portrays a bright young woman confronting her limits as she watches those she loves deal with illness and betrayal. Each turn of this elegiac debut revealed stark truths that left me both moved and astonished.”

Although Naomi’s insularity becomes somewhat diminished, darker events will swallow three of the people she cares most about, and the largest lesson she must learn is that she cannot save any of them. Her efforts to do so and eventual emergence from sadness are charted with restraint and empathy in Percer’s lyrical, slightly dreamy narrative. A subdued, thoughtful coming-of-age tale that hovers observantly on the edge of melancholia.