FINNY

Life lessons and imperfect love turn teenager Finn into a philosophical adult.

Delphine Short, aka Finny, comes of age slowly in Kramon’s quirky debut, a drawn-out story pervaded at times with a flavor of Alice in Wonderland. Growing up in Maryland, Finny falls in love at age 14 with Earl Henckel, the sensitive son of narcoleptic pianist Menalcus. But when Sylvan, Finny’s brother, tells her parents of the romance, she is dispatched, Victorian-style, to boarding school, where she befriends hygiene-obsessed dorm matron Poplan and rooms with rich New Yorker Judith. Kramon’s taste in quirky minor characters—a screaming headmistress, a sneezing undertaker—lends the story a surreal air, as does the small crew of overlapping principals. Over time, Poplan will marry Menalcus and Sylvan will become Judith’s lover. Meanwhile, Earl moves to Paris to be with his mother, and Finny finishes school and goes to college. She and Earl are reunited at one of Judith’s parties, and the future looks rosy until Earl hesitates about commitment, a pattern that will be repeated. Finn saves her mother from a con-artist, drifts between jobs and men and, finally, with an air of compromise, achieves her own resolution.

A colorless heroine, flimsy plotting and some sexually explicit moments transmute young adult–oriented material into something more peculiar and less satisfying.