FREYA THE DEER

A quirky young woman goes to college to find love and heartbreak in Richman’s coming-of-age novel.

Freya Rubenstein, a young girl from Cambridge, Massachusetts, struggles to make friends. She seems expressionless to some, strange and aloof, and she loses herself in whimsical fairy tales and Victorian novels. (In other words, she’s neurodivergent.) When she goes off to college in Washington state, at a hippie-dippy campus no “members of the Young Republicans had chosen” to attend, she learns to branch out and make new friends, falling in love in the process. Enter Caleb, a boy from Seattle who meets Freya in a freshman Humanities course. He’s taken by her direct approach to speech and her gentleness. The two become a couple, and soon they’re living together at Caleb’s mother’s home in Seattle. The curriculum at their college as well as Black Lives Matter protests quickly radicalize Caleb, and it’s unclear to what lengths he will go—and to what extent Freya will follow him—for justice. (Richman opens the novel in medias res with a scene of Freya wiring a bomb, leaving readers anxious to learn more.) Freya is a well-developed character, and her romance with Caleb, from a spur-of-the-moment trip to Vegas to the fallout of the summer protests, is both believable and fairy tale–like. The climax and denouement of the novel, rendered in sharp, poignant prose, are especially affecting. The narrative is charming but not without its issues—occasionally, the discussions of global politics and social justice feel shallow or didactic, and the novel itself begins to feel oddly conservative as it routinely paints the young idealogues as excessively extreme. The unevenness of the novel may actually add to its appeal; it is a story about a young woman finding her footing in college and in life, and if the book occasionally falters, so does Freya. It’s all the more honest for its flaws.

A sensitive protagonist anchors this oddball bildungsroman.