Fiction
I
enjoyed every minute of Kevin Wilson's latest book. I've read and
enjoyed several other books by Wilson (I read The Family Fang before we started this blog) and have come to look forward to
his embrace of the weird and, in that sense, Now is Not the Time to Panic
does not disappoint.
In the summer of 1996, Frankie Budge, a
bored, lonely, 16-year old self-described weirdo falls into a friendship
with Zeke Brown who has come to Coalfield, TN for the summer with his
mother because of trouble at home. Aspiring artists, the two create a
poster and begin hanging it all over town creating a mystery, eventually
a world-wide frenzy, and threatens to tear their friendship apart.
Now
is Not the Time to Panic is not a mystery. It's not a thriller, and
it's not a love story. I'm not joking when I tell you the book's blurb
is a pretty good synopsis of the entire plot. This book is about one
summer and how two young people put something out into the world and the
world took it as its own before they even had time to consider that it
could. Their poster was a viral hit before viral hits had a name and I
found it fascinating to see how that affected Frankie, Zeke, and the rest
of the town, particularly as Frankie and Zeke maintained their
anonymity. What would it mean for them to lose that anonymity after 20
years? Would they even want the world to know they created the poster?
I
loved the characters that Wilson created. There was a realism to each
of them that made me want to cheer them on and protect them. This isn't a
long book, but it's an interesting look at art and youth, and how the
decisions we make when we're young can ripple across time to catch us
when we don't expect them to. After all, "The edge is a shantytown
filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with
hunger for us."
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