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Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos
Prep meets The Secret History in Nash Jenkins’s Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos , a searing debut novel about a tragic scandal at an American prep school, told in the form of a literary investigation through a distinctly millennial lens.
“Juicy . . . Jenkins [is a] huge new literary talent.” —Curtis Sittenfeld, The Guardian
“If Holden Caulfield had been dropped into the Obama era, he might be Foster Dade.” — The National Book Review
When Foster Dade arrives at Kennedy, an elite boarding school in New Jersey, the year is 2008. Barack Obama begins his first term as president; Vampire Weekend and Passion Pit bump from the newly debuted iPhone; teenagers share confidences and rumors over BlackBerry Messenger and iChat; and the internet as we know it is slowly emerging from its cocoon. So, too, is Foster emerging—a transfer student and anxious young man, Foster is stumbling through adolescence in the wake of his parents’ scandalous divorce. But Foster soon finds himself in the company of Annabeth Whittaker and Jack Albright, the twin centers of Kennedy’s social gravity, who take him under their wing to navigate the cliques and politics of the carelessly entitled.
Eighteen months later, Foster will be expelled, following a tragic scandal that leaves Kennedy and its students irreparably changed. When our nameless narrator inherits Foster’s old dorm room, he begins an epic yearslong investigation into what exactly happened. Through interviews with former classmates, Foster’s blog posts, playlists, and text archives, and the narrator’s own obsessive imagination, a story unfurls—Foster’s, yes, but also one that asks us who owns our personal narratives, and how we shape ourselves to be the heroes or villains of our own stories.
Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos is about privilege and power, the pitfalls of masculinity and its expectations, and, most distinctly, how we create the mythologies that give meaning to our lives. With his debut novel, Nash Jenkins brilliantly captures the emotional intensities of adolescence in the dizzying early years of the 21st century.
“Juicy . . . Jenkins [is a] huge new literary talent.” —Curtis Sittenfeld, The Guardian
“If Holden Caulfield had been dropped into the Obama era, he might be Foster Dade.” — The National Book Review
When Foster Dade arrives at Kennedy, an elite boarding school in New Jersey, the year is 2008. Barack Obama begins his first term as president; Vampire Weekend and Passion Pit bump from the newly debuted iPhone; teenagers share confidences and rumors over BlackBerry Messenger and iChat; and the internet as we know it is slowly emerging from its cocoon. So, too, is Foster emerging—a transfer student and anxious young man, Foster is stumbling through adolescence in the wake of his parents’ scandalous divorce. But Foster soon finds himself in the company of Annabeth Whittaker and Jack Albright, the twin centers of Kennedy’s social gravity, who take him under their wing to navigate the cliques and politics of the carelessly entitled.
Eighteen months later, Foster will be expelled, following a tragic scandal that leaves Kennedy and its students irreparably changed. When our nameless narrator inherits Foster’s old dorm room, he begins an epic yearslong investigation into what exactly happened. Through interviews with former classmates, Foster’s blog posts, playlists, and text archives, and the narrator’s own obsessive imagination, a story unfurls—Foster’s, yes, but also one that asks us who owns our personal narratives, and how we shape ourselves to be the heroes or villains of our own stories.
Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos is about privilege and power, the pitfalls of masculinity and its expectations, and, most distinctly, how we create the mythologies that give meaning to our lives. With his debut novel, Nash Jenkins brilliantly captures the emotional intensities of adolescence in the dizzying early years of the 21st century.
544 pages, Paperback
First published May 16, 2023
344 people are currently reading
16771 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 702 reviews
April 17, 2023
Not every book is for everyone and this book just wasn’t for me. The plot is certainly up my alley - a boarding school scandal that combines coming-of-age ennui with millennial teen nostalgia - but the style is decidedly not.
The prose is incredibly dense and the conceit too clever - a former student (with no ties to the people this story is about) has researched and written this book and also made a good deal up because the level of detail doesn’t hold up the proposed premise. The description level is mind-boggling, often going back multiple generations before we get to any relevant information. In short, the writing is too pretentious to allow me anything approaching a connection to the story.
The prose is incredibly dense and the conceit too clever - a former student (with no ties to the people this story is about) has researched and written this book and also made a good deal up because the level of detail doesn’t hold up the proposed premise. The description level is mind-boggling, often going back multiple generations before we get to any relevant information. In short, the writing is too pretentious to allow me anything approaching a connection to the story.
May 6, 2023
This book made me miss being an English student, and it also made me miss my youth, which is a little bit silly since in some ways I'm still in it, but most importantly this book also made me feel less alienated and invalidated for the circles of self-sabotaging, self-hating, and self-aggrandizing angst my mind tends to run in.
On the surface, FOSTER DADE is about kids at boarding school and the rise of an Adderall ring and how all of that plus teen hormones and teen cruelty in the landscape of BlackBerries and Facebook all comes to a devastating, tragic, in many ways inevitable end. And it is all of those things, but really, at its heart, it’s a story about youth and wanting to fit into the ecosystem you find yourself in, and wanting to be happy in general, and finding it frustratingly difficult to do either let alone both of those things, especially at fifteen. It's also about the pressures and pitfalls of expected masculinity, and of course, given the boarding school setting, about privilege and the politics of class even/especially amongst high schoolers. And it is beautifully and so honestly written. I loved every page, I am obsessed.
Objectively, this book is written with talent and verve and expertise and pain and thoughtfulness and honesty and a tremendous amount of feeling. Subjectively, I found it to hit finely in many ways, and personally, at moments I was not okay, in the way (perhaps masochistically as a reader) you want a book to affect you.
Part of what is so expert about this story’s craft is that it perfectly achieves that narrative goal that the things that happen should be unexpected and yet make perfect sense. And true to that aim, the way these characters act just always fits perfectly. Everything that occurs feels inevitable, and yet I wouldn’t call any of it predictable, not at least in a lame or disappointing or (certainly not) cheap sense.
The verbosity particularly towards the end is frustrating to get through because I got weary of the interruptions and breaks from the linear story. And I want to say that it’s a conscious expertness on the part of controlling the pace to stretch out the climax, but the equal truth is that it’s simply frustrating to experience, like when someone is telling you a story and you know the good part/the satisfaction is a sentence away, but they keep delaying that reveal, dangling the achievement of satisfaction, talking instead about inconsequential things like visual descriptions of the scene or the historical background to these events etc. etc. Just give it to us!!! You can tell us those asides in the denouement. Stop dancing around the neat unfolding of this story, stop delaying our full receipt. But I obviously must commend that more than I criticize it, because clearly it made me feel things as any good piece of writing should. So well done, Nash. Point taken.
I love the way even Annabeth, whom Foster once described and always seemed to view as perfect beyond flaw ("I'm uniquely good at finding faults in people, especially as I get to know them better, but she is perfect"), even/especially she is complicated through the end. And I love the painful and frustrating realism of how everything shakes down in the end, and how those with particular privilege weather the chaos versus others, without it, who don’t (and how even those of lesser but still present privilege who do get caught in the torrent find themselves, for the privilege they do have, washing up on comfortable shores all the same). I love a book like this that talks about privilege in ways that are not high and mighty, instead of those obvious shallow and predictable attempts that are annoyingly self-aware and conspicuously self-satisfied.
Upon finishing:
I nearly started crying reading the last paragraph of the closing author’s note aloud to my roommate hahaha
This book should have a trigger warning about themes of suicide (since it’s not explicitly written into the cover copy), but aside from that dare I say it is perfect. And even that flaw is one not of story but of packaging.
It is sweeping in feeling, like TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, but a little bit grungier. It is like a grown-up THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER that nods to A SEPARATE PEACE. It is like MEAN GIRLS expanded across genders and without the comedic tone that in the movie softens the torturous cruelty of it all.
And it hit me particularly hard personally because of how much I related to Foster, and how frighteningly similar our patterns of thinking can often be (and particularly were, for me, in high school and even early college, and sometimes even now when the late-night thoughts spiral still). And it’s haunting to watch his story play out and to realize how closely mine might have resembled it all had just a few (not insignificant, to be fair, but passive on our part) details of initializing circumstance been different.
This book feels real, and it feels painfully beautiful. I’ll close this entry with a quote (just one of many palpably beautiful lines; every sentence in these 500+ pages is gorgeously constructed) a quote from the final lines of the book, and the last lines of Foster’s famous final paper: “There are moments like this when I allow myself to see the beauty I’d always foreclosed to myself. Part of me thinks that my ability to see it when I do is inseparable from the pain that I feel, and when I think that, the pain suddenly isn’t so bad. The sun is going to come up in the morning. I really don’t like myself a lot of the time, but sometimes I look back over the words I’ve written on my blog and elsewhere and I kind of smile at my own bullshit. I’ll grow up, and then I will come back to them again. It’s fine. I will be fine. There is a spastic firelight in everything. The trick is knowing how to find it.”
:,) <33
On the surface, FOSTER DADE is about kids at boarding school and the rise of an Adderall ring and how all of that plus teen hormones and teen cruelty in the landscape of BlackBerries and Facebook all comes to a devastating, tragic, in many ways inevitable end. And it is all of those things, but really, at its heart, it’s a story about youth and wanting to fit into the ecosystem you find yourself in, and wanting to be happy in general, and finding it frustratingly difficult to do either let alone both of those things, especially at fifteen. It's also about the pressures and pitfalls of expected masculinity, and of course, given the boarding school setting, about privilege and the politics of class even/especially amongst high schoolers. And it is beautifully and so honestly written. I loved every page, I am obsessed.
Objectively, this book is written with talent and verve and expertise and pain and thoughtfulness and honesty and a tremendous amount of feeling. Subjectively, I found it to hit finely in many ways, and personally, at moments I was not okay, in the way (perhaps masochistically as a reader) you want a book to affect you.
Part of what is so expert about this story’s craft is that it perfectly achieves that narrative goal that the things that happen should be unexpected and yet make perfect sense. And true to that aim, the way these characters act just always fits perfectly. Everything that occurs feels inevitable, and yet I wouldn’t call any of it predictable, not at least in a lame or disappointing or (certainly not) cheap sense.
The verbosity particularly towards the end is frustrating to get through because I got weary of the interruptions and breaks from the linear story. And I want to say that it’s a conscious expertness on the part of controlling the pace to stretch out the climax, but the equal truth is that it’s simply frustrating to experience, like when someone is telling you a story and you know the good part/the satisfaction is a sentence away, but they keep delaying that reveal, dangling the achievement of satisfaction, talking instead about inconsequential things like visual descriptions of the scene or the historical background to these events etc. etc. Just give it to us!!! You can tell us those asides in the denouement. Stop dancing around the neat unfolding of this story, stop delaying our full receipt. But I obviously must commend that more than I criticize it, because clearly it made me feel things as any good piece of writing should. So well done, Nash. Point taken.
I love the way even Annabeth, whom Foster once described and always seemed to view as perfect beyond flaw ("I'm uniquely good at finding faults in people, especially as I get to know them better, but she is perfect"), even/especially she is complicated through the end. And I love the painful and frustrating realism of how everything shakes down in the end, and how those with particular privilege weather the chaos versus others, without it, who don’t (and how even those of lesser but still present privilege who do get caught in the torrent find themselves, for the privilege they do have, washing up on comfortable shores all the same). I love a book like this that talks about privilege in ways that are not high and mighty, instead of those obvious shallow and predictable attempts that are annoyingly self-aware and conspicuously self-satisfied.
Upon finishing:
I nearly started crying reading the last paragraph of the closing author’s note aloud to my roommate hahaha
This book should have a trigger warning about themes of suicide (since it’s not explicitly written into the cover copy), but aside from that dare I say it is perfect. And even that flaw is one not of story but of packaging.
It is sweeping in feeling, like TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, but a little bit grungier. It is like a grown-up THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER that nods to A SEPARATE PEACE. It is like MEAN GIRLS expanded across genders and without the comedic tone that in the movie softens the torturous cruelty of it all.
And it hit me particularly hard personally because of how much I related to Foster, and how frighteningly similar our patterns of thinking can often be (and particularly were, for me, in high school and even early college, and sometimes even now when the late-night thoughts spiral still). And it’s haunting to watch his story play out and to realize how closely mine might have resembled it all had just a few (not insignificant, to be fair, but passive on our part) details of initializing circumstance been different.
This book feels real, and it feels painfully beautiful. I’ll close this entry with a quote (just one of many palpably beautiful lines; every sentence in these 500+ pages is gorgeously constructed) a quote from the final lines of the book, and the last lines of Foster’s famous final paper: “There are moments like this when I allow myself to see the beauty I’d always foreclosed to myself. Part of me thinks that my ability to see it when I do is inseparable from the pain that I feel, and when I think that, the pain suddenly isn’t so bad. The sun is going to come up in the morning. I really don’t like myself a lot of the time, but sometimes I look back over the words I’ve written on my blog and elsewhere and I kind of smile at my own bullshit. I’ll grow up, and then I will come back to them again. It’s fine. I will be fine. There is a spastic firelight in everything. The trick is knowing how to find it.”
:,) <33
May 15, 2023
I wanted to love this. A book dubbed “The Secret History meets Prep”? Sign me up, I thought! But after beginning I quickly realized I wanted to unsubscribe from this nearly 600 page slog. This shouldn’t be compared to The Secret History, beyond the fact that it takes place at a school.
I’m normally fine with a book that’s heavy on characters, if they’re well developed, and light on plot, but this was tough. Not a lot happens from start to finish, except some extremely uncomfortable sex (I’m no prude, but yikes) and lots of drugs. Lots of drugs. We get it.. Foster takes Vyvanse for his ADD. It’s mentioned so awkwardly and often by name in a way I cannot truly imagine a teenager knowing or caring about, that this book reads like one big advertisement for the medication for a large swath of the story.
My biggest complaint is how verbose this book is. I was glad I read it on a Kindle so I could look up a word every third page. It snapped me out of the story to read some of the over the top sentences that didn’t feel particularly great, more so like they were written with a thesaurus open. That said, I think this book lacked some serious editing, and maybe that’ll happen before the ARC goes to final print.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchange for my honest review.
I’m normally fine with a book that’s heavy on characters, if they’re well developed, and light on plot, but this was tough. Not a lot happens from start to finish, except some extremely uncomfortable sex (I’m no prude, but yikes) and lots of drugs. Lots of drugs. We get it.. Foster takes Vyvanse for his ADD. It’s mentioned so awkwardly and often by name in a way I cannot truly imagine a teenager knowing or caring about, that this book reads like one big advertisement for the medication for a large swath of the story.
My biggest complaint is how verbose this book is. I was glad I read it on a Kindle so I could look up a word every third page. It snapped me out of the story to read some of the over the top sentences that didn’t feel particularly great, more so like they were written with a thesaurus open. That said, I think this book lacked some serious editing, and maybe that’ll happen before the ARC goes to final print.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchange for my honest review.
March 18, 2023
Wow, this book...I'm going to find it hard to articulate what it did to me. I just finished it and am kind of in a daze. I am going to mail it to a friend ASAP. I was mortified by its size at first, and I think that may have colored my initial ability to immerse myself fully into the story; I was finding it a bit slow. I'm not sure when, but that definitely changed, and rather insidiously I might add. This story is sneaky. Maybe even stealthy. Ninja-like. The writing style is pristine. Pristine. And I will go so far as to say the author is an artist. A very intelligent artist. I found myself a helpless fly in the web of this story. It couldn't unfold fast enough for me, but the slow burn of it was so satisfying at the same time. It is extremely hard to describe. If you are put off by the size, I get it. But sometimes you just have to go for it, my friends. Some things are worth it.
I won this novel in a Goodreads giveaway.
I won this novel in a Goodreads giveaway.
May 17, 2023
I had been so looking forward to the release of Nash Jenkins' debut. The intersection of adolescent angst with boarding school hijinks anticipated the literary fireworks I so desperately craved. While NOTHING can compare to Donna Tartt's "The Secret History," I was excited that "Foster Dade Explores The Cosmos" had been likened to it.
However...
This book was, fundamentally, too long. About 370 pages too long in fact. I'm amazed such long-winded prose made it past a professional editor, where a tight word-count is everything. Setting aside the pages-long digressions when introducing the Kennedy School (multiple paragraphs are used to describe a single academic building), as well as every single character (some of whom are only mentioned once, yet we know their father runs a hedge fund, their older sister attends Yale, and the family summer compound is on Polpis Road on Nantucket), the book found itself trapped in literary dead ends where the story ground to a screeching halt. Speaking of the plot, where was it? Jenkins took too long to introduce and develop it; he seemed more interested in describing his characters--right down to their outfits, EVERY SINGLE TIME they entered a scene--than in giving his characters something to do. (As an aside, his main cast was flat, uninteresting, and cliched. We have met them before under different names in different books).
The structure of the book was completely lacking, jumping between points-of-view and from past to present. Jenkins' nameless narrator was meant to be a younger student, yet is creepily "all-knowing." Even when we believe the book does indeed switch to Foster's perspective, the narrator will jump in to remind you that Foster does not have one. The abrupt "reminder" took you out of the story time and time again.
The early aughts blog entries and iTunes playlists included in the book (to appear dynamic, it would seem) were completely useless and served as gratuitous additions to build a world that had been overwritten.
It was impossible to become invested in this book knowing that it was saying nothing and going nowhere.
However...
This book was, fundamentally, too long. About 370 pages too long in fact. I'm amazed such long-winded prose made it past a professional editor, where a tight word-count is everything. Setting aside the pages-long digressions when introducing the Kennedy School (multiple paragraphs are used to describe a single academic building), as well as every single character (some of whom are only mentioned once, yet we know their father runs a hedge fund, their older sister attends Yale, and the family summer compound is on Polpis Road on Nantucket), the book found itself trapped in literary dead ends where the story ground to a screeching halt. Speaking of the plot, where was it? Jenkins took too long to introduce and develop it; he seemed more interested in describing his characters--right down to their outfits, EVERY SINGLE TIME they entered a scene--than in giving his characters something to do. (As an aside, his main cast was flat, uninteresting, and cliched. We have met them before under different names in different books).
The structure of the book was completely lacking, jumping between points-of-view and from past to present. Jenkins' nameless narrator was meant to be a younger student, yet is creepily "all-knowing." Even when we believe the book does indeed switch to Foster's perspective, the narrator will jump in to remind you that Foster does not have one. The abrupt "reminder" took you out of the story time and time again.
The early aughts blog entries and iTunes playlists included in the book (to appear dynamic, it would seem) were completely useless and served as gratuitous additions to build a world that had been overwritten.
It was impossible to become invested in this book knowing that it was saying nothing and going nowhere.
January 12, 2025
one of the most beautifully written and well crafted books i've ever read. a literary investigation brought to life and featuring the really intriguing, complex main character of foster dade, as well as so many intricate details that make this story feel real. 4 stars.
May 27, 2023
my aunt and uncle work at the prep school nash attended (and that kennedy, the prep school in the book is not-so-secretly based on) and when i was a kid i’d go visit them on holidays and wander through the empty dorms and wonder what it would be like to go to school there, instead of my central pennsylvania public school. this book fully immersed me in that hypothetical world.
i texted some friends when i was about 200 pages in to say that this book is like the secret history meets the perks of being a wallflower, but far less corny than perks and for people whose teenage riot by sonic youth was kids by mgmt. i stand by this positive review even though it does feel a bit reductive and not encompassing of everything this book accomplishes. I really enjoyed the various interruptions in the book in the form of foster’s blogspot posts; iTunes playlists; iMessages and BBMs; Facebook messages and emails. nash has wrote and constructed a character who scarily closely resembles me at 15 and somehow made him a universal symbol of adolescence and the near-pathological desire to be accepted. this book is mainly set in the late aughts, yet it doesn’t feel aged, and the author’s use of social media and digital communication feels like a natural part of storytelling and not a stilted addition that doesn’t stand the test of time. overall: painfully beautiful, adeptly and gorgeously written.
i texted some friends when i was about 200 pages in to say that this book is like the secret history meets the perks of being a wallflower, but far less corny than perks and for people whose teenage riot by sonic youth was kids by mgmt. i stand by this positive review even though it does feel a bit reductive and not encompassing of everything this book accomplishes. I really enjoyed the various interruptions in the book in the form of foster’s blogspot posts; iTunes playlists; iMessages and BBMs; Facebook messages and emails. nash has wrote and constructed a character who scarily closely resembles me at 15 and somehow made him a universal symbol of adolescence and the near-pathological desire to be accepted. this book is mainly set in the late aughts, yet it doesn’t feel aged, and the author’s use of social media and digital communication feels like a natural part of storytelling and not a stilted addition that doesn’t stand the test of time. overall: painfully beautiful, adeptly and gorgeously written.
October 18, 2025
An excessively long and very florid adult novel about a boarding-school kid who sells drugs. A little like what you might get if someone decided to write highbrow literary fiction about a side character from Gossip Girl. This is love-it-or-hate-it stuff – the purple prose borders on parody at times – but I found it mostly charming, and it has moments of real beauty. It’s also elevated by the weird narrative framing, in which an entirely uninvolved observer writes up the whole story with a huge amount of detail he can’t possibly have known.
June 9, 2023
Foster Dade is easily the best book I’ve read this year. I’ll read just about anything that gets compared to a Secret History, yet I think a better parallel would be The Great Gatsby, The Goldfinch, or Catcher in the Rye (if it was infinitely more digestible for adults). If Seth Cohen found his way to a New Jersey boarding school for his coming-of-age story, you’d get Foster Dade.
It’s a story about what it’s like to be young and clever and not quite comfortable with one’s self. It’s a perfect period piece for those of us who congregated on bedroom floors with high school friends in 2008 to make iTunes playlist while sharing stories. A read for those who have rich inner lives and sometimes get lost inside their own minds. Reading this book gave me a feeling that I will forever seek to replicate and will think about for a long time to come.
It’s a story about what it’s like to be young and clever and not quite comfortable with one’s self. It’s a perfect period piece for those of us who congregated on bedroom floors with high school friends in 2008 to make iTunes playlist while sharing stories. A read for those who have rich inner lives and sometimes get lost inside their own minds. Reading this book gave me a feeling that I will forever seek to replicate and will think about for a long time to come.
June 3, 2023
This book is so long that when I finished I wanted to give it 5 stars because I almost cried, but that would be revisionist history, although I really liked this book against all odds (the odds being a male narrator).
I love how the author gives credence to teenage feelings and experiences, intricacies of group politics and sadness that don’t condescend or wink ironically.
There were large stretches of this book that I wish I didn’t need to read, including many descriptions of our titular Foster playing with himself (many) and other similarly unfortunate pitfalls of reading from the male perspective (did we need several pages detailing the effects of reading Harry Potter erotica fan fiction… I’m not sure we did).
However, the writing style was my favorite (pretentious with lots of big words!) and these characters were incredibly vivid. So vivid, in fact, that they inspired me to dig up something I wrote in high school that this book eerily reminded me of and recontextualize it to myself in a similar vein to what the narrator of this book is attempting to do with Foster’s story. The framing device doesn’t always work in my opinion, but it kept the book from succumbing to itself many times.
This book did what few books I’ve read this year could, and that was keep me reading with a propulsion I thought I’d lost forever, so for that I thank it.
I love how the author gives credence to teenage feelings and experiences, intricacies of group politics and sadness that don’t condescend or wink ironically.
There were large stretches of this book that I wish I didn’t need to read, including many descriptions of our titular Foster playing with himself (many) and other similarly unfortunate pitfalls of reading from the male perspective (did we need several pages detailing the effects of reading Harry Potter erotica fan fiction… I’m not sure we did).
However, the writing style was my favorite (pretentious with lots of big words!) and these characters were incredibly vivid. So vivid, in fact, that they inspired me to dig up something I wrote in high school that this book eerily reminded me of and recontextualize it to myself in a similar vein to what the narrator of this book is attempting to do with Foster’s story. The framing device doesn’t always work in my opinion, but it kept the book from succumbing to itself many times.
This book did what few books I’ve read this year could, and that was keep me reading with a propulsion I thought I’d lost forever, so for that I thank it.
June 21, 2023
3.5 stars. i cannot say i loved living inside a depressed teenage boy’s brain for 500+ pages, but it was beautifully written
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December 21, 2024Since no one else wants to say it, I guess I will. This book is 544 pages of excessive and graphic depictions of minors jerking off and having sex. Foster Dade could have been an incredible opportunity for Jenkins to comment on toxic masculinity, how porn influences men's empathy towards women, and how such topics influence our relationships and mental health throughout youth, but what we get is rather another "boys will be boys" driven book that essentially amounts to nothing and seeks validation through nostalgia.
Absolutely NOTHING about this book is reminiscent of The Secret History. No aspect of Foster Dade falls into the category of dark academia. With that being said, for a book that's plot is supposed to involve the main character selling drugs, this book really isn't even about drugs either. I feel that so much of this book's defense is that it is trying to authentically portray the lingo, the values, and the social climate of those back in 2008-2010, but if you are going to write a book consumed with so much misogyny, shouldn't there be a point?
There are no likeable characters in this book. Every female character exists with the sole purpose of being traumatized by another male character, usually in a sexual way. Every female character is described by their hotness, their breast size, how good they would be in bed. There is nothing remarkable or interesting about Foster other than the fact that the narrator does their best to convince us we should care - only for the reader to realize in the end that there simply truly never was anything to care about in the first place.
The structure of this book is absolutely punishable. The constant jumping between timelines made this book nearly impossible to listen to at times. I feel like this structure made Foster's story even more cold and distant and unapproachable than it already was. This book could have benefited dramatically from being edited and cut down several hundred pages.
The only reason I'm rating 2/5 stars is because I'm adding an extra star for MYSELF for sitting through 22 hours of the audiobook.
Major TW's for graphic sex scenes depicting minors, graphic and excessive scenes involving masturbation, sexual assault, drug use, suicide, misogyny, homophobia, bullying.
Absolutely NOTHING about this book is reminiscent of The Secret History. No aspect of Foster Dade falls into the category of dark academia. With that being said, for a book that's plot is supposed to involve the main character selling drugs, this book really isn't even about drugs either. I feel that so much of this book's defense is that it is trying to authentically portray the lingo, the values, and the social climate of those back in 2008-2010, but if you are going to write a book consumed with so much misogyny, shouldn't there be a point?
There are no likeable characters in this book. Every female character exists with the sole purpose of being traumatized by another male character, usually in a sexual way. Every female character is described by their hotness, their breast size, how good they would be in bed. There is nothing remarkable or interesting about Foster other than the fact that the narrator does their best to convince us we should care - only for the reader to realize in the end that there simply truly never was anything to care about in the first place.
The structure of this book is absolutely punishable. The constant jumping between timelines made this book nearly impossible to listen to at times. I feel like this structure made Foster's story even more cold and distant and unapproachable than it already was. This book could have benefited dramatically from being edited and cut down several hundred pages.
The only reason I'm rating 2/5 stars is because I'm adding an extra star for MYSELF for sitting through 22 hours of the audiobook.
Major TW's for graphic sex scenes depicting minors, graphic and excessive scenes involving masturbation, sexual assault, drug use, suicide, misogyny, homophobia, bullying.
April 1, 2023
Thank you to Edelweiss and Abrams for allowing me to read an ARC of Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos.
I don’t normally write reviews this long, but it’s been months since I’ve been this enthralled with a book. I knew at 10% in that it would probably be a favorite of the year and it’s only February. Now that I’ve finished (though this may be a touch dramatic) it’s definitely a contender for favorite book of all time. I loved everything about it and I haven’t read a book this well crafted in quite a while.
Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos by Nash Jenkins at first glance is a journalistic report from our unnamed narrator writing about Foster Dade, the previous occupant of his dorm room at an elite boarding school, and the 18 months leading up to his expulsion in 2008-2010, but it is so much more than that. At its core, Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos is a literary coming of age novel of epic proportions that gives the reader an in depth character study of the titular character, Foster Dade as he grapples with mental health, masculinity, relationships, sexuality, the mythologies created by adolescent minds and so much more.
You will come to know Foster so intimately (sometimes more intimately than one would enjoy) and he will become so real to you. He may not always make the best choices and you won’t always be proud of him, but his thoughts and emotions are so excruciatingly real that it is impossible not to become almost obsessed as I have in the last few days of reading this book. Shortly following his parents divorce, Foster enrolls in the elite Kennedy School, an east coast boarding school dominated by the wealthy and affluent. He falls in with the two center of social gravity, Jack Albright and Annabeth Whittaker, and their group of friends that has essentially accumulated from the circles that rich people tend to run in.
The late ‘00s cultural references were immaculate and truly captured the vibe, especially the playlists that are interspersed throughout the book (featuring The Killers, MGMT, Passion Pit, and Cobra Starship ft. Blair Waldorf herself, Leighton Meester). The first chapter’s epigraph being the iconic opening line of Mr. Brightside by the Killers really sets the scene perfectly.
The writing as well never ceased to amaze me, Nash Jenkins is very talented and that is an undeniable fact. The amount of time and effort put into writing this book must have been insane. The story is told by an unnamed narrator who has become almost obsessed with trying to tell the tale of the boy who has become part of the Kennedy School’s mythology. Throughout the book he pulls blog posts, emails, texts, and testimony from Foster’s classmates in order to weave this tale. By virtue of having an unreliable narrator (not sure if unreliable would be the correct word, but certainly the truth of this story is relative), Jenkins truly captured the idea of the mythologies we create and how they can become blown out of proportion to the extent that even myself as a reader have not been able to stop thinking about fictional Foster Dade. In this sense it is reminiscent of The Virgin Suicides both thematically and in terms of narration. The other two major comparisons I would make is to The Goldfinch, for its sprawling, in-depth character study and quite frankly it’s brilliant vocabulary, and of course Gossip Girl due to its incisive breakdown of the east coast elite and, the immaculate 2008-2010 cultural references.
Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos is long, very ambitious, and will put you through the emotional wringer, but it is so very worth it. This book blew me away, enraptured me if you will, easiest 5⭐️ I’ve given in a long time and I can’t wait to get my hands on a physical copy when it’s out and sell the shit out of it at work because I have a feeling Foster Dade will live in my head for a while.
Edit: almost everyone in this book uses a Blackberry, and for that reason alone I think we need more 2008 period pieces.
I don’t normally write reviews this long, but it’s been months since I’ve been this enthralled with a book. I knew at 10% in that it would probably be a favorite of the year and it’s only February. Now that I’ve finished (though this may be a touch dramatic) it’s definitely a contender for favorite book of all time. I loved everything about it and I haven’t read a book this well crafted in quite a while.
Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos by Nash Jenkins at first glance is a journalistic report from our unnamed narrator writing about Foster Dade, the previous occupant of his dorm room at an elite boarding school, and the 18 months leading up to his expulsion in 2008-2010, but it is so much more than that. At its core, Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos is a literary coming of age novel of epic proportions that gives the reader an in depth character study of the titular character, Foster Dade as he grapples with mental health, masculinity, relationships, sexuality, the mythologies created by adolescent minds and so much more.
You will come to know Foster so intimately (sometimes more intimately than one would enjoy) and he will become so real to you. He may not always make the best choices and you won’t always be proud of him, but his thoughts and emotions are so excruciatingly real that it is impossible not to become almost obsessed as I have in the last few days of reading this book. Shortly following his parents divorce, Foster enrolls in the elite Kennedy School, an east coast boarding school dominated by the wealthy and affluent. He falls in with the two center of social gravity, Jack Albright and Annabeth Whittaker, and their group of friends that has essentially accumulated from the circles that rich people tend to run in.
The late ‘00s cultural references were immaculate and truly captured the vibe, especially the playlists that are interspersed throughout the book (featuring The Killers, MGMT, Passion Pit, and Cobra Starship ft. Blair Waldorf herself, Leighton Meester). The first chapter’s epigraph being the iconic opening line of Mr. Brightside by the Killers really sets the scene perfectly.
The writing as well never ceased to amaze me, Nash Jenkins is very talented and that is an undeniable fact. The amount of time and effort put into writing this book must have been insane. The story is told by an unnamed narrator who has become almost obsessed with trying to tell the tale of the boy who has become part of the Kennedy School’s mythology. Throughout the book he pulls blog posts, emails, texts, and testimony from Foster’s classmates in order to weave this tale. By virtue of having an unreliable narrator (not sure if unreliable would be the correct word, but certainly the truth of this story is relative), Jenkins truly captured the idea of the mythologies we create and how they can become blown out of proportion to the extent that even myself as a reader have not been able to stop thinking about fictional Foster Dade. In this sense it is reminiscent of The Virgin Suicides both thematically and in terms of narration. The other two major comparisons I would make is to The Goldfinch, for its sprawling, in-depth character study and quite frankly it’s brilliant vocabulary, and of course Gossip Girl due to its incisive breakdown of the east coast elite and, the immaculate 2008-2010 cultural references.
Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos is long, very ambitious, and will put you through the emotional wringer, but it is so very worth it. This book blew me away, enraptured me if you will, easiest 5⭐️ I’ve given in a long time and I can’t wait to get my hands on a physical copy when it’s out and sell the shit out of it at work because I have a feeling Foster Dade will live in my head for a while.
Edit: almost everyone in this book uses a Blackberry, and for that reason alone I think we need more 2008 period pieces.
August 18, 2023
This book was incredibly frustrating for me. While it did a very good job of pulling me in and keeping me hooked, there was a lot that bothered me.
-first of all, it was too long and could have been parsed down while still keeping to the same timeline
-the writing style was obnoxiously pretentious and there was so much repetition of words and phrases that made this book feel unedited
-unnecessary descriptions of characters and their parents and their jobs and the sports they played in high school and how they met and all this backstory for a character that has one line or that is very very irrelevant. It added nothing to the story to do this, just made it tedious.
-the overkill of descriptions that made sentences so long that they became confusing and necessitated re-reading
-the climax is very dull and not well played out and just kind of happens and you are left to wonder, “oh…so that’s it?”
-the POV that was an unreliable narrator who was investigating this story and claimed to be trying to stick as as close to the truth as possible, and to do so would sometimes say things like “we can’t actually know what happened here” but then switches to an omniscient POV that knows thoughts, private conversations, graphic intimate details—this took me out of the story so much because it cannot be both. It is either a narrator who knows very little and is reporting and trying to keep journalistic integrity by sticking to the facts, or it is an omniscient 3rd person who knows everything. It felt very sloppy. This felt like the author thought they found a creative loophole that was really just bad writing and a lack of any editorial oversight.
Still, taking all of that into account, it was immersive and engaging, but like I said, very frustrating.
-first of all, it was too long and could have been parsed down while still keeping to the same timeline
-the writing style was obnoxiously pretentious and there was so much repetition of words and phrases that made this book feel unedited
-unnecessary descriptions of characters and their parents and their jobs and the sports they played in high school and how they met and all this backstory for a character that has one line or that is very very irrelevant. It added nothing to the story to do this, just made it tedious.
-the overkill of descriptions that made sentences so long that they became confusing and necessitated re-reading
-the climax is very dull and not well played out and just kind of happens and you are left to wonder, “oh…so that’s it?”
-the POV that was an unreliable narrator who was investigating this story and claimed to be trying to stick as as close to the truth as possible, and to do so would sometimes say things like “we can’t actually know what happened here” but then switches to an omniscient POV that knows thoughts, private conversations, graphic intimate details—this took me out of the story so much because it cannot be both. It is either a narrator who knows very little and is reporting and trying to keep journalistic integrity by sticking to the facts, or it is an omniscient 3rd person who knows everything. It felt very sloppy. This felt like the author thought they found a creative loophole that was really just bad writing and a lack of any editorial oversight.
Still, taking all of that into account, it was immersive and engaging, but like I said, very frustrating.
August 5, 2023
Yeah, sure, whatever, absolutely nothing fucking happens in this book that justifies its length. But every single excruciatingly detailed page about early Facebook photo-sharing culture and verbose anecdotal tangent drew me in, transported me straight back to the early 2000s, and had me so hooked I did not want to leave.
In a way, it is difficult to avoid using Jenkin's blatantly pretentious journalistic voice now that I have finished the book. Yes, it is written in a style that takes itself way too seriously, and reading it sometimes feels the same as listening to some guy’s long-winded comments in an English seminar discussion, but that’s part of its charm and part of the authentic experience. Every single character in this book takes themselves too seriously, and the collection of self-focused perspectives creates a unique collection of unreliable narratives. By the end, you really do wonder what the fuck actually transpired.
It is marketed as The Secret History meets Prep, but Kennedy is far more Constance Billard from Gossip Girl than it is Bennington College. The stretched-out story is reminiscent of those old CW shows that were dragged out for 21 45-minute episodes per season. And exactly like GG, you are forced to love the very detestable kids that populate the narrative, Blackberries, drugs, uncomfortable sex scenes, and all.
In a way, it is difficult to avoid using Jenkin's blatantly pretentious journalistic voice now that I have finished the book. Yes, it is written in a style that takes itself way too seriously, and reading it sometimes feels the same as listening to some guy’s long-winded comments in an English seminar discussion, but that’s part of its charm and part of the authentic experience. Every single character in this book takes themselves too seriously, and the collection of self-focused perspectives creates a unique collection of unreliable narratives. By the end, you really do wonder what the fuck actually transpired.
It is marketed as The Secret History meets Prep, but Kennedy is far more Constance Billard from Gossip Girl than it is Bennington College. The stretched-out story is reminiscent of those old CW shows that were dragged out for 21 45-minute episodes per season. And exactly like GG, you are forced to love the very detestable kids that populate the narrative, Blackberries, drugs, uncomfortable sex scenes, and all.
January 3, 2025
3.5 stars
i liked:
-that the narrative itself was interesting
-how old money the names were
-foster <3
-the sad ending
i didn't like:
-the wordy and self-indulgent writing
-the unnecessarily long length (so many things could have been cut, and it felt like there was a lot of repetition... there were also waaay too many characters awarded the same amount of narrative weight—seriously could not tell you a single character trait about some of these people)
-the handling of certain topics/plot threads
-the fact that this was set in high school! it's giving euphoria high! i wish it had been set in university...
i liked:
-that the narrative itself was interesting
-how old money the names were
-foster <3
-the sad ending
i didn't like:
-the wordy and self-indulgent writing
-the unnecessarily long length (so many things could have been cut, and it felt like there was a lot of repetition... there were also waaay too many characters awarded the same amount of narrative weight—seriously could not tell you a single character trait about some of these people)
-the handling of certain topics/plot threads
-the fact that this was set in high school! it's giving euphoria high! i wish it had been set in university...
Read
December 23, 20253.75 - In Here there's a really intense emotional story about repression, queerness, toxic masculinity, feelings of sexual inadequacy, isolation, and the devastating consequences of pill-pushing big pharma; but it feels like I'm constantly fighting against the prose and the frame narrative.
The frame narrative unnecessarily pulls the reader out of the story and inserts a perspective that ultimately does not provide a payoff, and detracts from what could have been told in unframed 3rd person, or perhaps a more diary-like 1st person from Foster in the vein of Perks of Being a Wallflower. I can't help but feel that the author does exactly what Foster is accused of/accuses himself of: intellectualizing suffering and complicated emotion. I wanted to sit in the complexity of the emotions that Jack & Foster felt at the point of Foster's 'betrayal' & the 'solution' to the mystery of Jack. You're hardly given a moment's breath to do so when time is spent describing the 50-year history of Kennedy's tennis closet. The solution is also presented non-linearly with inserts of conversations with another friend from the gang in the present, 10 years after the story's events, in a way that completely detracts from the immediacy of the narrative. A lot of these winding asides about culture, such as the history of online chatrooms, or the popularity of Disney shows, also pull one out of the story. One of the greatest issues is the history of Kennedy. The narrator's quest to gain access to Jack & the rest of the crew post-mortem was utterly unnecessary. The narrator has a tendency to withhold information and create great fanfare about said information and reactions to it. The effect it has on it is more of confusion than intrigue. I.e. the narrator talks around a set of damning FB chats between girls, talks about the fallout from them, reveals some of them, continues to talk about the fallout, and swings back and forth between this in a way that deprives the supposedly damning messages of any weight. How am I supposed to feel Foster's shock/embarrassment/rage at reading these messages when we keep bouncing back and forth to the history of each girl in that chatroom's family line of legacy Kennedy students? The story could have been told chronologically to stronger emotional effect.
The worldbuilding does not work for me here--the author tries to make a living character out of the school Kennedy circa 2006 (made in the image of his actual school from childhood). In my mind, the pinnacle of the academic setting exists in Donna Tartt's The Secret History , which manages to be lyrical and establishing without being unnecessarily intrusive. The constant insertions of Kennedy's faux history pull you out of the narrative rather than making the school feel lived in. Something important that I considered reading the story was--why didn't Foster try to make other friends outside of this group (besides Jae, who was critical to the drug plot; and even then was severely underwritten aside from his social class & the subsequently unaddressed TRAUMA he is subjected to in Hong Kong????)? Or rather, why didn't we spend more time with some of the kids he met in the newspaper club, his other classes, etc? I didn't ever gain anything from learning more about Gracie's coldness. We learn about other high achievers like that kid who was the DJ/eventual social chair; but instead of it being a marker of time that helps you age along with the characters, it felt like an unnecessary detail. The narrator tends to focus on family trees and histories of socioeconomic backgrounds instead of really getting into the personalities of some of these other minor characters; in this way buys into the class-conscious elitism that he hopes to critique.
Annabeth. I don't think it's so much that she lacks depth, I think she's believably written, I think I just lack context. What happened at Lake Placid?? What was going through her head between then and the Hamptons? What caused that shift where she clearly wanted to be something more with Foster? Was she dissuaded by his inability to be proactive/assertive and take things to the next level? Did she default to Jack because that was what was 'expected' of them since they were both the most popular? The narrator finds her in the present, goes into detail about how unlikely he thought it would be that he tracked her down...and gains no new insight from the interaction. So much weight went into building suspense for the Facebook exposures and emails etc., but not nearly enough went into the *death*. Somebody died~ & it felt like it didn't matter except as a form of motivation for the essay, which wasn't even that spicy.
TLDR my central issue is that there is deep character work going on, but the investigative framing narrative, which ultimately does not prove itself essential, stifles and constrains the story from going a level deeper.
All of that said I do feel incredibly for Foster by the end of the story. I definitely feel like I have a better understanding of how teenage boys actually think, and what they worry about. I deeply empathized with Foster and worried for him throughout. Despite my gripes and frustrations with the prose, once I got past the first 150 pages I read the majority of the book in one sitting. The days leading up to it when I read the opening pages in snatches, I kept wanting to go home and read and get back to Foster. I'm glad I read this story. The strongest parts of the story are Annabeth x Foster x Jack, & at least when they're on the bridge that night, I think each loved one another purely, romantically, and innocently.
The frame narrative unnecessarily pulls the reader out of the story and inserts a perspective that ultimately does not provide a payoff, and detracts from what could have been told in unframed 3rd person, or perhaps a more diary-like 1st person from Foster in the vein of Perks of Being a Wallflower. I can't help but feel that the author does exactly what Foster is accused of/accuses himself of: intellectualizing suffering and complicated emotion. I wanted to sit in the complexity of the emotions that Jack & Foster felt at the point of Foster's 'betrayal' & the 'solution' to the mystery of Jack. You're hardly given a moment's breath to do so when time is spent describing the 50-year history of Kennedy's tennis closet. The solution is also presented non-linearly with inserts of conversations with another friend from the gang in the present, 10 years after the story's events, in a way that completely detracts from the immediacy of the narrative. A lot of these winding asides about culture, such as the history of online chatrooms, or the popularity of Disney shows, also pull one out of the story. One of the greatest issues is the history of Kennedy. The narrator's quest to gain access to Jack & the rest of the crew post-mortem was utterly unnecessary. The narrator has a tendency to withhold information and create great fanfare about said information and reactions to it. The effect it has on it is more of confusion than intrigue. I.e. the narrator talks around a set of damning FB chats between girls, talks about the fallout from them, reveals some of them, continues to talk about the fallout, and swings back and forth between this in a way that deprives the supposedly damning messages of any weight. How am I supposed to feel Foster's shock/embarrassment/rage at reading these messages when we keep bouncing back and forth to the history of each girl in that chatroom's family line of legacy Kennedy students? The story could have been told chronologically to stronger emotional effect.
The worldbuilding does not work for me here--the author tries to make a living character out of the school Kennedy circa 2006 (made in the image of his actual school from childhood). In my mind, the pinnacle of the academic setting exists in Donna Tartt's The Secret History , which manages to be lyrical and establishing without being unnecessarily intrusive. The constant insertions of Kennedy's faux history pull you out of the narrative rather than making the school feel lived in. Something important that I considered reading the story was--why didn't Foster try to make other friends outside of this group (besides Jae, who was critical to the drug plot; and even then was severely underwritten aside from his social class & the subsequently unaddressed TRAUMA he is subjected to in Hong Kong????)? Or rather, why didn't we spend more time with some of the kids he met in the newspaper club, his other classes, etc? I didn't ever gain anything from learning more about Gracie's coldness. We learn about other high achievers like that kid who was the DJ/eventual social chair; but instead of it being a marker of time that helps you age along with the characters, it felt like an unnecessary detail. The narrator tends to focus on family trees and histories of socioeconomic backgrounds instead of really getting into the personalities of some of these other minor characters; in this way buys into the class-conscious elitism that he hopes to critique.
Annabeth. I don't think it's so much that she lacks depth, I think she's believably written, I think I just lack context. What happened at Lake Placid?? What was going through her head between then and the Hamptons? What caused that shift where she clearly wanted to be something more with Foster? Was she dissuaded by his inability to be proactive/assertive and take things to the next level? Did she default to Jack because that was what was 'expected' of them since they were both the most popular? The narrator finds her in the present, goes into detail about how unlikely he thought it would be that he tracked her down...and gains no new insight from the interaction. So much weight went into building suspense for the Facebook exposures and emails etc., but not nearly enough went into the *death*. Somebody died~ & it felt like it didn't matter except as a form of motivation for the essay, which wasn't even that spicy.
TLDR my central issue is that there is deep character work going on, but the investigative framing narrative, which ultimately does not prove itself essential, stifles and constrains the story from going a level deeper.
All of that said I do feel incredibly for Foster by the end of the story. I definitely feel like I have a better understanding of how teenage boys actually think, and what they worry about. I deeply empathized with Foster and worried for him throughout. Despite my gripes and frustrations with the prose, once I got past the first 150 pages I read the majority of the book in one sitting. The days leading up to it when I read the opening pages in snatches, I kept wanting to go home and read and get back to Foster. I'm glad I read this story. The strongest parts of the story are Annabeth x Foster x Jack, & at least when they're on the bridge that night, I think each loved one another purely, romantically, and innocently.
May 22, 2023
I won an advance copy of this in a Goodreads giveaway.
I'm DNF'ing it at 40 percent for reasons that are a little mysterious to me but which are probably mostly about my mood. The writing is good, the characters interesting, the plot structure unique. But I've been reading this for weeks and I'm not making any progress so it's time to bail. Part of the reason is that it's a big heavy hardcover, which, I'm sorry if this makes me sound lazy, but I hate carrying it around when I'm out and about in the city, so I just don't. If it were a mass-market paperback I probably would've blazed through it by now. Or maybe not.
With all that said, I'm giving it five stars anyway, which maybe isn't fair since I didn't actually read all of it, but I am king of Ben's Goodreads Reviews and I can do what I want. I'm giving it five stars because I want to encourage people to check it out. I think there's something special here, and I think someone with more patience, or someone who's in the mood to vibe with it, will find it. I hope to come back to it at some point myself but I rarely ever go back to things, so this might be an unfortunate case of two ships passing in the night.
If it sounds interesting to you, do check it out. Don't be put off by the title, which sounds like a Mad Libs of YA novel keywords. It's much more Donna Tartt than anything YA.
I'm DNF'ing it at 40 percent for reasons that are a little mysterious to me but which are probably mostly about my mood. The writing is good, the characters interesting, the plot structure unique. But I've been reading this for weeks and I'm not making any progress so it's time to bail. Part of the reason is that it's a big heavy hardcover, which, I'm sorry if this makes me sound lazy, but I hate carrying it around when I'm out and about in the city, so I just don't. If it were a mass-market paperback I probably would've blazed through it by now. Or maybe not.
With all that said, I'm giving it five stars anyway, which maybe isn't fair since I didn't actually read all of it, but I am king of Ben's Goodreads Reviews and I can do what I want. I'm giving it five stars because I want to encourage people to check it out. I think there's something special here, and I think someone with more patience, or someone who's in the mood to vibe with it, will find it. I hope to come back to it at some point myself but I rarely ever go back to things, so this might be an unfortunate case of two ships passing in the night.
If it sounds interesting to you, do check it out. Don't be put off by the title, which sounds like a Mad Libs of YA novel keywords. It's much more Donna Tartt than anything YA.
April 7, 2023
4.5. Enthralling and gorgeous and nostalgic and warm! I'll be thinking about this book for a long time to come. And the reading process itself was a long one - I didn't expect to sit with it and consume it in small snippets, but I think it worked for such an immense story.
Foster Dade is a fascinating and complicated character, and the evolution of his relationships with Annabeth Whittaker and Jack Albright is exactly the kind of fraught and complicated dynamic I craved from a 2008 time capsule of a story. This deep dive into the mind of teenage boy desperate for friendship and understanding aches to read, especially when set against the complicated social hierarchy of a predominantly rich and white boarding school where Facebook is a weapon and drug abuse is expected. Foster is a heartbreaking character to live inside of, and his story left me with a bittersweet appreciation for the time we spent together.
I found the prose itself to be a bit long-winded. While there was never a point where this deterred me from reading, there were moments where I felt myself starting to skim because the information didn't connect with me or felt less pertinent than the interiority of Foster's life. However, I still thoroughly enjoyed the flow of this novel, and look forward to it sticking with me.
Foster Dade is a fascinating and complicated character, and the evolution of his relationships with Annabeth Whittaker and Jack Albright is exactly the kind of fraught and complicated dynamic I craved from a 2008 time capsule of a story. This deep dive into the mind of teenage boy desperate for friendship and understanding aches to read, especially when set against the complicated social hierarchy of a predominantly rich and white boarding school where Facebook is a weapon and drug abuse is expected. Foster is a heartbreaking character to live inside of, and his story left me with a bittersweet appreciation for the time we spent together.
I found the prose itself to be a bit long-winded. While there was never a point where this deterred me from reading, there were moments where I felt myself starting to skim because the information didn't connect with me or felt less pertinent than the interiority of Foster's life. However, I still thoroughly enjoyed the flow of this novel, and look forward to it sticking with me.
June 21, 2023
I have much to say. This ended up being in a lot of ways a very sad story, one that I didn’t entirely expect it to be. I throughly enjoyed it. At the start I wasn’t so sure because the writing was so intense and SO wordy, (kinda written pretentiously if you ask me, I guess it was for a reason). There was a lot time spent of me looking up definitions to words. Even then I’m sure there were some things that flew over my head. It was overwhelming at first but then I sunk into the story and had trouble prying it from my hands each night. It’s about rich pretentious kids and all the trouble they find themselves in order to fit in but It’s also a story about a very sad boy who feels like an alien no matter where he goes and makes decisions to try and remedy that. It’s a downward spiral of a story but I loved it. A train wreck that you can see coming but can’t look away. It’s like gossip girl mixed with the secret history mixed with beautiful boy. The pop culture references were so fun. The music playlists were bomb. The 2008-2010 era was so iconic and this book reminded me why (also references the not so cool rise in adderall abuse). There was no shocking ending because you just pick up everything along the way but it makes it no less heartbreaking the events that unfold.
I just adore books that you can just disappear into and be a fly on a wall.
Look up trigger warnings though!
I just adore books that you can just disappear into and be a fly on a wall.
Look up trigger warnings though!
March 8, 2024
at some points this was difficult to get through, and seemed to really drag on. i could see glimmers of beauty and carefully composed prose and plot points throughout. maybe i’ll pick this up again later in the year and see if it changes my rating
dnf
December 26, 2023dnf @ 2%
read the preface and tried reading the first chapter but omg why is this so wordy for absolutely no reason 😭😭 it feels like he’s saying a whole bunch of nothing i cannot read anymore of this
read the preface and tried reading the first chapter but omg why is this so wordy for absolutely no reason 😭😭 it feels like he’s saying a whole bunch of nothing i cannot read anymore of this
June 21, 2023
This book will not be for everyone, but oh baby, it was definitely for me! A bunch of rich, white prep school kids misbehaving—music to my ears! Speaking of music, there is a lot of music throughout this novel. Taking place from 2008-2010 we get to see what Foster is listening to, and being close to the same age as Foster was myself in the mid-2000s, it was a lot of the same music I listened to and loved. On the surface this story is about an Adderall ring in an elite New Jersey boarding school, but it is so much more than that. This book is dripping in ennui and nostalgia, exploring how it feels to grow up and always feeling like you’re on the outside looking in while trying to figure out who you are. It really examines how cruel teens can be to each other and how fragile everything seems. I feel like I know Foster, I finished this book last night but the heartbreaking finality of it is only really hitting me now. Even though you know tragedy is coming from the very beginning, you don’t know what exactly, and the quiet demise was so affecting.
The structure and narrative was also so captivating. It’s told in the form of a literary investigation, where a man that inherits Foster’s dorm the year after he is expelled becomes so obsessed with him and his friends that he starts to compile a bunch of information from texts, emails, Foster’s personal blog, and stories from old classmates that tell the story of this enigmatic figure he makes Foster out to be and his time at Kennedy. The is a lot of passages where the unnamed narrator has to “fill in the blanks” and imagine how certain conversations between Foster and whoever might have gone, but we will never actually know what really went down. This also kind of reiterates how easy rumours and stories are spread and blown way out of proportion in high school. This part of the book takes place between 2019-2022, very far removed from their days at Kennedy. We get to hear from classmates of Foster as adults and see what has become of them, those who agreed to meet up and speak with the narrator at least.
If you don’t like extremely detailed (some may say overwritten and I can’t even really disagree even though I was loving it), dense, a little pretentious, and slow placed stories, I don’t think this will be for you, but no book has felt this human since I read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow last year. I also read this at the perfect time, right after finishing Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, I unknowingly paired these books together perfectly, and if you read both, you'll know why.
The structure and narrative was also so captivating. It’s told in the form of a literary investigation, where a man that inherits Foster’s dorm the year after he is expelled becomes so obsessed with him and his friends that he starts to compile a bunch of information from texts, emails, Foster’s personal blog, and stories from old classmates that tell the story of this enigmatic figure he makes Foster out to be and his time at Kennedy. The is a lot of passages where the unnamed narrator has to “fill in the blanks” and imagine how certain conversations between Foster and whoever might have gone, but we will never actually know what really went down. This also kind of reiterates how easy rumours and stories are spread and blown way out of proportion in high school. This part of the book takes place between 2019-2022, very far removed from their days at Kennedy. We get to hear from classmates of Foster as adults and see what has become of them, those who agreed to meet up and speak with the narrator at least.
If you don’t like extremely detailed (some may say overwritten and I can’t even really disagree even though I was loving it), dense, a little pretentious, and slow placed stories, I don’t think this will be for you, but no book has felt this human since I read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow last year. I also read this at the perfect time, right after finishing Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, I unknowingly paired these books together perfectly, and if you read both, you'll know why.
September 22, 2023
On one hand I’m amazed by how much I loved this; on the other hand, this is a serious work of literature that discusses Lizzie McGuire with the depth and gravity of a sacred text. So, this 5-star rating was kind of inevitable.
The book follows Foster Dade, an aimless, brilliant, and overly self-reflective teenage boy who stumbles into being the region’s premiere high school drug kingpin. It’s kind of like the movie Charlie Bartlett if it were about a million times more depressing. I think the comps listed in the book’s marketing—The Secret History and Prep—are pitch perfect, and yet while I was too upset/annoyed by both of those books to really enjoy them, this one really worked for me. Though I didn’t love Secret History, I mean it as a huge compliment when I say this is the only book I’ve read that actually deserves to be compared to Donna Tartt.
I think where Foster Dade feels so similar to those other “dark academia” books (ew) is in the intensity and richness of the world it creates. I’m the same age as Foster and the author, so I was especially impressed with how well Jenkins captured the time period—that’s the music I used to listen to while doing my homework! Those are the same books I was reading! I also had a high school blogspot! Usually I’m not a huge fan of pop culture references in books, but here I think they really add to the sense of time and place, and you don’t need to understand them all to enjoy the story.
The meta narrative and time jumps worked incredibly well for me, even when I sometimes struggled to follow what was going on. I didn’t always feel the momentum of Foster’s story, so it was the narrator’s interjections that kept me turning the pages, waiting with a powerful sense of dread for what was coming.
I could see the narrator—and therefore, Jenkins’ prose—not being for everyone. Be ready to pull out the dictionary, because silver-dollar words are used *frequently* (candent, sublunary, and azimuth are just a few new additions to my vocabulary). Beloved themes, images, and words (“contour” in particular) can get repetitive. Jenkins has a wonderful talent for describing light to set the scene, but eventually I started to wish those descriptions were used more sparingly.
That being said, Jenkins can really write. His scenes are moody and dreamy, but he also knows just when to drop in a detail that will keep you reading a few more minutes after you meant to go to bed or get back to work. In the same way that Beautiful World, Where Are You was a 5-star read for me, the issues I saw in this book didn’t take away from my enjoyment. The world of Foster Dade was so specific and haunting and charged with meaning, and I just wanted to keep hanging out there.
Highly recommend this one. I’m picky, but this is a book that’s earned how seriously it takes itself.
The book follows Foster Dade, an aimless, brilliant, and overly self-reflective teenage boy who stumbles into being the region’s premiere high school drug kingpin. It’s kind of like the movie Charlie Bartlett if it were about a million times more depressing. I think the comps listed in the book’s marketing—The Secret History and Prep—are pitch perfect, and yet while I was too upset/annoyed by both of those books to really enjoy them, this one really worked for me. Though I didn’t love Secret History, I mean it as a huge compliment when I say this is the only book I’ve read that actually deserves to be compared to Donna Tartt.
I think where Foster Dade feels so similar to those other “dark academia” books (ew) is in the intensity and richness of the world it creates. I’m the same age as Foster and the author, so I was especially impressed with how well Jenkins captured the time period—that’s the music I used to listen to while doing my homework! Those are the same books I was reading! I also had a high school blogspot! Usually I’m not a huge fan of pop culture references in books, but here I think they really add to the sense of time and place, and you don’t need to understand them all to enjoy the story.
The meta narrative and time jumps worked incredibly well for me, even when I sometimes struggled to follow what was going on. I didn’t always feel the momentum of Foster’s story, so it was the narrator’s interjections that kept me turning the pages, waiting with a powerful sense of dread for what was coming.
I could see the narrator—and therefore, Jenkins’ prose—not being for everyone. Be ready to pull out the dictionary, because silver-dollar words are used *frequently* (candent, sublunary, and azimuth are just a few new additions to my vocabulary). Beloved themes, images, and words (“contour” in particular) can get repetitive. Jenkins has a wonderful talent for describing light to set the scene, but eventually I started to wish those descriptions were used more sparingly.
That being said, Jenkins can really write. His scenes are moody and dreamy, but he also knows just when to drop in a detail that will keep you reading a few more minutes after you meant to go to bed or get back to work. In the same way that Beautiful World, Where Are You was a 5-star read for me, the issues I saw in this book didn’t take away from my enjoyment. The world of Foster Dade was so specific and haunting and charged with meaning, and I just wanted to keep hanging out there.
Highly recommend this one. I’m picky, but this is a book that’s earned how seriously it takes itself.
August 29, 2025
probably like 4.5 stars ?? realistically? rounded up because i truly did love this book. the style in which it was told was a bit odd, and i think the book would’ve benefited from being told from an omniscient narrators pov in between the unnamed narrators writings because you had to really suspend your disbelief at times with the amount of detail this person wrote about foster’s mundane life. the plot itself was really interesting, it was slow and didn’t really pick up til about 65% in but i love a slow book so that was not an issue for me personally.
need to get a physical copy asap. as soon as it comes out as a paperback lol.
need to get a physical copy asap. as soon as it comes out as a paperback lol.
July 7, 2023
The story feels like a superficial homage to Bret Easton Ellis, and the writing tries too hard to resemble Donna Tartt, both writers I very much admire. Maybe i’m being biased, and maybe this book just isn’t for me, but I have to say that this purple prose, using so many “interesting” words to end up saying nothing at all is not something I can imagine anyone to enjoy.
August 22, 2023
I am fifteen again for a moment I feel the possibility of everything and then I wake up
January 20, 2024
This was one of my top books of 2023. I read 4 pages of it on Kindle and immediately ordered a physical copy, despite my hatred of hardcover books, because I knew I needed to own this one. This is a coming-of-age story, though it is marketed as similar to The Secret History (as every book set at a school is these days).
It's so raw and real and flawed. Upon reading this, I immediately felt like I was struggling to understand social hierarchies, unsure of my standing, and muddling through social cues. I forgot how deep and big everything feels when you're 15, and this book took me straight back to that. I also forgot how mean kids can be. My heart hurt for Foster, Jae, Porter, and everyone else throughout the book. I really enjoyed the themes of masculinity, privilege, power, class, mental health, youth, sexuality, and finding your place. I loved the use of playlists to draw in that nostalgic feeling and truly place me right in the late 2000s.
This was haunting, beautiful, real, and deep. I'm already excited to re-read it.
It's so raw and real and flawed. Upon reading this, I immediately felt like I was struggling to understand social hierarchies, unsure of my standing, and muddling through social cues. I forgot how deep and big everything feels when you're 15, and this book took me straight back to that. I also forgot how mean kids can be. My heart hurt for Foster, Jae, Porter, and everyone else throughout the book. I really enjoyed the themes of masculinity, privilege, power, class, mental health, youth, sexuality, and finding your place. I loved the use of playlists to draw in that nostalgic feeling and truly place me right in the late 2000s.
This was haunting, beautiful, real, and deep. I'm already excited to re-read it.
October 26, 2023
For about the first quarter of this book I could see the potential in the story and themes unfolding, but I was quickly disappointed, and the whole rest of the book was just a slog to get through. I should have accepted defeat and put it down much earlier, but I tried to keep hopefully pushing through, which ultimately meant I invested too much of my time, and could not peacefully leave it unfinished.
A former student at an elite boarding school tells the story of Foster Dade, investigating the expulsion and scandals that surrounded the boy. Most of the story is told through Foster's perspective, taken from the student's blog entries which intimately describe his years at the school, and the relationships formed.
This book explored a lot of topics that I feel are important to be discussed, the American teenage experience and all of its isolation and disillusionment, struggles with sexuality, and primarily, the effects of drug abuse. However, I don't feel like the book particularly did a good job at creating any weight or importance to these topics.
Reading a book through the eyes of a teenage boy is bound to be uncomfortable, but the perspective that this shed on the teenage girls in the novel was just gross, upsetting, and exhausting to continuously read about. So many of the sexual scenes were unnecessary, and there was so much sexual violence and assault in this book, with absolute no consequences or discussions surrounding it. There could have been many opportunities to discuss toxic masculinity, but the boys in this book were just able to commit sexual assault on the fly, and we move on by the next page. There is a scene in this book where a group of girls face heavy consequences from what is plainly malicious gossip between teenagers, but absolute zero consequences arise for a whole herd of boys committing sexual crimes.
This echoes the problem I had with the homophobic scenes in this book. Also incessant with no real weight to them. And they also felt extremely unrealistic. The students are attending school in 2008, but I still feel like it is really bizarre and not at all reflective of real life for the majority of a student body to be homophobic, and for no other students or teachers to be challenging this rhetoric. Felt like watching a cliche teenage bully movie.
Don't even get me started on the manic pixie dreamgirlificaition of Annabeth.
Overall this book is far too long, weighed down with details upon details that don't amount to anything or progress the book in any way, and filled with so many uncomfortable scenes that felt like they were happening in a vacuum, with no commentary or exploration to give any of the characters something to take away. No thanks.
A former student at an elite boarding school tells the story of Foster Dade, investigating the expulsion and scandals that surrounded the boy. Most of the story is told through Foster's perspective, taken from the student's blog entries which intimately describe his years at the school, and the relationships formed.
This book explored a lot of topics that I feel are important to be discussed, the American teenage experience and all of its isolation and disillusionment, struggles with sexuality, and primarily, the effects of drug abuse. However, I don't feel like the book particularly did a good job at creating any weight or importance to these topics.
Reading a book through the eyes of a teenage boy is bound to be uncomfortable, but the perspective that this shed on the teenage girls in the novel was just gross, upsetting, and exhausting to continuously read about. So many of the sexual scenes were unnecessary, and there was so much sexual violence and assault in this book, with absolute no consequences or discussions surrounding it. There could have been many opportunities to discuss toxic masculinity, but the boys in this book were just able to commit sexual assault on the fly, and we move on by the next page. There is a scene in this book where a group of girls face heavy consequences from what is plainly malicious gossip between teenagers, but absolute zero consequences arise for a whole herd of boys committing sexual crimes.
This echoes the problem I had with the homophobic scenes in this book. Also incessant with no real weight to them. And they also felt extremely unrealistic. The students are attending school in 2008, but I still feel like it is really bizarre and not at all reflective of real life for the majority of a student body to be homophobic, and for no other students or teachers to be challenging this rhetoric. Felt like watching a cliche teenage bully movie.
Don't even get me started on the manic pixie dreamgirlificaition of Annabeth.
Overall this book is far too long, weighed down with details upon details that don't amount to anything or progress the book in any way, and filled with so many uncomfortable scenes that felt like they were happening in a vacuum, with no commentary or exploration to give any of the characters something to take away. No thanks.
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