Unprecedented Times

by Malavika Kannan

Malavika Kannan establishes herself as the literary voice of Gen Z in this piercing coming-of-age narrative

Which comes experience or narrative? Rishi thinks she knows the answer as she arrives on campus for her first year at Stanford. Her narrative is set—she’s going to leave behind the strict trappings of her Indian-American childhood in Florida, embrace her queer identity, experiment with love, and write all about it. Within a few months, she gets a new tattoo, makes her first real best friend, falls in love with her un-labeled situationship, and even gets her heart broken. Rishi’s first semester Asian American Autofiction final practically writes itself.

What is not a part of Rishi’s plan, however, is the onset of the COVID pandemic. As the outside world becomes a terrifying place, she finds more and more solace in the friendships she’s made. In lieu of virtual college, Rishi and her classmates join a farm collective and grapple with America’s political situation and growing disillusionment…along with sexual tension and responsibility. It’s only when those relationships, too, start fracturing under the stress of careless decisions, unrequited crushes, jealousies, and, yes, the unprecedented times, that Rishi begins to question her own story.

Unprecedented Times captures the beauty, frustration, love, and pain that exists in relationships between best friends, between lovers, between mothers and daughters, and between storytellers and themselves. Malavika Kannan’s fresh, arresting novel captures the excitement and the terror of modern young adulthood through the eyes of an unforgettable, flawed, and lovable narrator.

Genres: Fiction, Queer, LGBT, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Coming Of Age, Adult Fiction

352 pages, Paperback

Expected publication August 18, 2026

Reviews

[Olivia · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5⭐️ thank you to Netgalley for the ARC. Frustrating. But it IS very funny to have your self insert character in your navel gaze-y autofiction novel state publicly that they are pro-navel gazing in the first 20 pages. That got a chuckle out of me.

This did not work for me as a meta-commentary on autofiction or as a COVID coming of age as the blurb suggests. While there are some interesting vignettes, they feel adrift in the rest of the low-plot stream-of-consciousness narrative in which our central character learns nothing and does not grow at all (except the final chapter, the strongest part of the book, which ends abruptly) These topics and experiences might be better synthesized in a collection of personal essays or short stories. Otherwise, this feels more akin to a self-indulgent glamorized diary than a work of literary fiction.

I say this with grace: Unprecedented Times, like most of Kannan’s other work I have read, feels unripe. This feels like an early draft rushed to publication in the immediate aftermath of her experiences, with no opportunity to gain the distance and perspective that this book desperately needs. That’s not to say it’s HORRIBLE, or that she is untalented, there’s good stuff here. I just wish I read it later in her career, when she was ready to kill her darlings. I wish she had an editor willing to tease the strengths out, because they ARE here. The marketing for her litfic debut (and for a lot of her other stuff) relies on “the unfiltered mind of Gen Z” element that misses the real value of her perspective, which does not derive from her youth. (If anything, the market is over saturated with Gen Z stream of consciousness opinion, it’s every corner of the internet, all the time. I say this as a zillennial) There are some interesting arguments and lyrical turns of phrase, but it’s bogged down in a lot of pithy, self-aggrandizing nothingness.

Does a story have to mean something? Does Rishi (and Kannan) have to find narrative meaning in her experiences for them to be worthwhile? It’s an underbaked thesis. If your argument is that it means nothing, surprise! It now has the meaning and purpose of declaring not all experiences have narrative meaning. Really, you need to have an editor who can call you out on shit like this. Is it worthwhile? Decide for yourself.

Again, all the love and light in my heart to this author, but if all the characters/plot points are from your real life with the serial numbers filed off AND you refuse to engage with the themes to pluck meaning from the experiences, why bother to write fiction at all? Why not a blogpost, a tweet, an essay, a memoir? If you don’t care to find a point to all of this after 352 pages, why the fuck should I?

TLDR: Best of luck to this ambitious young writer, but I’m uninterested in reading every ham-fisted first draft raced to publication that paves her way.

[cyd · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.75
Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an advanced readers copy in exchange for an honest review. This book was so amazing I am actually speechless. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect going into it but it had a pretty cover and the synopsis sounded interesting so i figured why not. I was not expecting to enjoy this book so much. I am often wary when reading books revolving around the pandemic because they never really capture what it felt like going through that time in a way that feels worth it. This book explored the pandemic and its effects on people without it seeming unnatural. The characters in this book were messy and real and relatable. Reading this made me forget I was reading it felt like watching an intimate home diary of someone’s life. I don’t even have the words to explain how much I loved this but I seriously recommend it.

[Malavika Kannan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hope you like it!

[Lily ♡ · Rating 2 out of 5]

The problem with autofiction is that sometimes the author’s life isn’t nearly as interesting as they think it is.

Things I liked:

- Rishi being a burnt out youth climate activist. Really interesting and I wish we had more ruminations on this and how it affects her day to day life.

- Time spent on the farming co-op. I could only take so much of the run-of-the-mill Gen Z characters in run-of-the-mill Gen Z places like college or NYC. The setting had so much potential! (It did also make me wish I was just reading Alison Bechdel’s Spent, which is an actually interesting and well written autofiction about queers on a farm during the pandemic)

- Solid pacing. I liked the distinct acts and the writer’s ability to skip time without it being disorienting or seemingly unnecessary.

Things I didn’t:

-The characters. Jesus Christ, the characters. Maybe the problem is that I know these people way too well. I spent too much time in college surrounded by filthy rich kids with leftist politics and cliques and infighting. Just a personal issue for me I guess but I did not like spending time with any of them. I love an unlikable character, but it has too be purposeful and well done. This was not.

- Rishi’s voice and meme references. Jesus Christ the meme references. Maybe it would be better if I was less online and didn’t know that the quilt remarks were ripped off of twitter but unfortunately I did know this and I couldn’t help but cringe, like when someone makes a joke you read online three weeks ago and you just have to fake laugh. I understand that it’s time appropriate for the pandemic but was very frustrating for me to read.

- The way privilege is addressed in the story. It’s mentioned often (slay), comparing dynamics and characters mentioning, but doing nothing to offset, their privilege, both racial and economic. I love a story with evil rich characters, and I feel like if this was more well written/edited it could be a stronger commentary on how although these kids are aware and guilty of their privilege, they do nothing to help others. That’s real, that’s believable, but I worry that many readers will not understand this, as it was very muddled.



Anyways it’s the best cover art I’ve seen in a while. I also read that the author thinks you can just choose to be a lesbian and wahoo boy I could definitely tell from the book.

[Kimmy]

dnf'ing at ~20% bc i lived this exact kind of insufferable gen z college experience and i don't feel the need to revisit it for 300+ pages. this is a great cultural document; i'll give it that.

[Rob Boylan]

DNF

Thank you to Henry Holt for the chance to read this early, but this book was not for me. That's fine. Not every book should be, or needs to be, for every reader (especially not old white guys -- however enlightened they like to think they are).

My feeling is that this book (her second, but first adult book) came too soon in life for this writer. I think back to my own writing in my twenties and my shoulders shrivel at the idea of anyone having read it, let alone having it published by a mainstream publisher. At not being able to get every last copy back. 

I also felt like her editor failed her a little bit? It's another thing I think back on, where I've felt like an editor could have protected me from myself. Yes, the writer has to write and you can't impede that, but is it not an abdication of duty to not advise, “hey, you already used ‘hearty’ on page 8, lets think of something besides ‘heartily’ for page 9”? Those are the little things they explicitly make red felt pens for. 

I really did have high hopes for this because the cover is absolutely incredible (the ARC did not have the artist or designer info filed out yet), but I just couldn't make it very far. It's a young person's book, and I've got clouds to argue with.

[Seairra Mortellaro]

Unfortunately, this book was not my cup of tea, mainly because of the writing style. It felt very unpolished and was hard to read at times. The humor was too millenial-ish for me personally, which doesn't really match up with the marketing material claiming that Kannan is "the literary voice of Gen-Z". I can't definitively speak to the quality of the book as a whole, as I did not finish it, and these issues are specific to my preferences rather than definite flaws. So if you don't mind a very casual writing style and millennial memes, you might like this book.

Thank you to Netgalley for providing an ARC copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

[Sherry Moyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗛𝗔𝗣𝗦
Rishi arrives at Stanford ready for her life to begin. Out from under the burden of her Asian mother’s love, she wants to pursue a degree in literature so she can write books and she wants to have a lot of gay sex.

Upon meeting her roommate, Georgia, Rishi is immediately smitten - and the two form a bond that looks like, feels like love. They share everything, processing every action and emotion with each other.

And then it’s March of 2020 and the world shuts down.

After a few painful months at home, Rishi and her group of friends from Stanford - including Georgia - decide to join a farm collective in the mountains of rural Pennsylvania. But once there, relationships become trickier to navigate, choices are made, and Rishi’s life changes dramatically.

𝗙𝗘𝗘𝗟𝗜𝗡𝗚𝗦
Millennials in books are often not my jam. Rishi is self centered and borders on narcissistic behavior throughout the story. She feels entitled and believes that simply telling someone she’s sorry should be enough to absolve her of what’s happened. She struggles with her overbearing mother without once really trying to understand her motivations.

I found her difficult to like.

And then I discovered this is autofiction, meaning much of this is based on real situations and feelings, but fictionalized to help the author deal with complex emotions. And that definitely confused the plot for me.

I don’t know. It was a lot. I struggled to get into it, thoroughly enjoyed the middle half, and then was extremely frustrated by the ending.

𝗩𝗜𝗕𝗘 𝗖𝗛𝗘𝗖𝗞
Millennials behaving like fictionalized millennials.

𝗥𝗘𝗖𝗢𝗠𝗠𝗘𝗡𝗗
That’s up to you. I found Rishi difficult and the selfishness to be overwhelming at times. It’s character driven and complex.

Lots of TWs - DM me or check them out online.

3.5⭐️

[Megan Beauregard · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank you to Henry Holt & Co. and NetGalley for the ARC!

This coming of age novel, set during the "unprecedented time" of our generation, follows a young queer burned-out activist during her first year of college and the onset of the Covid pandemic. I worried I might see too much of myself in this novel - or worse, that I wouldn't be able to get through it because of the proximity of Covid quarantine, despite the 6 years that have passed. Instead, I was drawn into the messy inner life of a young woman trying to navigate major life transitions, and failing miserably. Marked with witty quips, one-liners, and Gen-Z slang, the book sometimes slides too far into humor and away from depth, character development, and reflection. The intensity and emotional impact gets lost when every difficult moment doesn't get a chance to stick the landing before it turns into a punchline.

The novel brought up a lot of prevalent topics: the Covid pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, climate change and climate activism, farm and manual labor, and the early stages of figuring out your sexuality. For a narrator focused on writing and making a difference, with a background in climate activism, I expected the main character to "practice what she preached," or explore the way these topics touched her life. How does a climate activist spend a gap year working on a farm, but doesn't explore the impact of that labor, communal living, or the effects of climate change on farming? What does it mean for her friend/love interest, the daughter of CDC workers on the front lines of the pandemic, to accompany her to a NYC bar at the height of Covid? What does it mean for a queer woman who declares to "hate men" to only seek out sex with men when she is feeling bored or self-destructive? This book had so much potential, but fell flat.

If you seek out unreliable, complicated, and unapologetic main characters, then Unprecedented Times by Malavika Kannan is your kind of book! There is a distance between the main character and everyone else in the story - this unreliable narrator has a skewed perspective of events and her role in them. Unfortunately, it was hard for me to read as an adult watching this teenager make the worst mistakes of their life and then not learn anything or take any responsibility for her actions. I feel like I aged out of the demographic that would enjoy this book - 10 years ago it would have been perfect for the teenager I was: someone struggling to find friendships that fit, coming into my queerness, and becoming angry with the injustices of the world we live in.

Anyone who: deflects trauma with humor, is still figuring out their sexuality, has a group of queer misfit friends, and has definitely stalked their ex-situationship on social media: this book is for you!

[Hanner · Rating 5 out of 5]

So compulsively readable it was like scrolling TikTok 2020 style lol

And Rishi is 2020; she’s furious, she’s exhausted, she’s overinformed and touch starved. She’s doing her best in an impossible era to have to come of age into. She’s also a queer daughter born to Indian immigrants, marching into an unprecedented future with a knife for a tongue and a tender hand reaching back for her mother’s. She’s bristly and so completely lovable.

Yeah. I’d hand sell the fuckkkk outta this one

[Naima]

I’m just gonna be real I felt sooo cool reading an ARC of this book (thanks Netgalley!) while the author was the subject of the latest major niche queer internet discourse.

This book was a very true and real story about people who went to college in the year 2019. Everything cringey about it was unfortunately actually just accurate. Similar to another review I read on here, I did sort of wish the main character would go through more personal growth and self reflection than she did—but who’s to say that’s not realistic too? Yet another book that had more vibes than plot, but the drama and mess of it all kept me turning the pages.

[Kennedy Cole · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an incredible read! I flew through this and thoroughly enjoyed the formatting. Normally, I don’t love such long, seamless chunks of texts, but I think it worked well for this novel. This story was heartbreaking, and very relatable as a recent college graduate who’s also been on both sides of the friendship breakup. I think Rishi’s character arc and overall development was written really well. I’d give this 4.5 stars, but round it down to 4 simply because this is a surprisingly dark story that I don’t think I’ll read again, but still thoroughly enjoyed.

[Elin Isaksson]

Loved it! A coming of age story for the Gen Z idealists who had to experience a lot of historic events in a quick succession. Life and people are hard. The audio book was amazing.

[MC · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you NetGalley for the eARC!

Every queer person I’ve known has been Rishi at some point in their lives. In this raw exploration of coming out and coming of age during the COVID 19 pandemic, Kannan provides with a complex narrative about identity, love, and friendship.

Unprecedented times ran the gamut of making me laugh, cry, and want to scream. At times you resent Rishi and her Indian American life that is narrated as if she is a character from HBO’s Girls. In other moments, you want to hold her hand and hope she learns, grows, and takes better care of herself.

The relationships- and the messiness of them- was central to the story. Who are we without our families? Our friends? And what happens when our self narrated understanding of who we are begin to crumble?

Mirroring so much of my queer college millennial experience, the beauty, tragedy, abs mundanity of Unprecedented Times will be in my head for a long time.

Check the triggers before checking this one out!

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This literary fiction coming of age novel took me a minute to get into. It’s written by a Gen Z author for Gen Z readers. I’m a parent of Gen Z’ers. However, once the setting was established and I got to know the characters, I felt more invested and ended up loving this read. The book had me remembering my college years, finding the similarities in what is a time of striving for independence and creating one's future as well as the differences in culture and expectations of young adults today versus 35 years ago.

Kannan is extremely observant and able to describe things in a smoothly vivid way. I like her writing style and her sense of humor. Rishi, our protagonist, comes across as a flawed but still likable character. This book seems to be auto fiction, and Rishi is taking a class on auto fiction, so it’s perhaps meta auto fiction?

It’s definitely worth a read. If you’re over 30 give yourself at least fifty pages to become immersed.

[Steve Oyler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance copy!

Although I’m certainly not anywhere near this book’s target audience, there is something universal about the communicative property of the COVID pandemic that (now that enough time has passed) even allows a queer 20-something coming-of-age tale resonate with me.

Does the biographical nature of the story result in Rishi never fully understanding how destructive (disruptive?) she truly is? It seems so. Even in the end trouble is everyone else’s fault, bad times forced upon her by the evil of others. But maybe that’s the point. How many of us want to look full-on in the mirror at the effect we have on others?

[Jenna B · Rating 3 out of 5]

Got from a free library back in May/june. Finished it barely before its official release date. Not as much resolution at the end as I’d like but get it. Overall enjoyed. Dialogue w no quotes and kinda a jumpy writing style.

[kennedy parrish · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 ⭐️ Wow, I almost forgot how it felt to be a young adult in 2020. Thanks for reminding me.

[Sadie Zabawa]

Autofiction about autofiction......meta autofiction? I liked the tone fwiw :)

[Sara]

As I first starting reading, I had doubts about this book. I didn’t find the first section about Rishi’s college experience terribly interesting. I think stories about college freshmen getting drunk and laid for the first time are kind of like dreams — only interesting to the person telling them. It also took a bit of time for me to get used the prose, which was a little too casual. I don’t necessarily like when a book sounds like how an author talks — I prefer the prose to be more literary. Some of the sentences felt like they were pulled directly from the author’s Twitter drafts. I also realized I have complicated feelings about auto fiction. I saw another review citing Toni Morrison, who apparently tell hers students NOT to write what you know, and I also see why she would give that advice. HOWEVER, as the book continued, I settled more into the style and the characters. I was surprised by how not-annoying I found a book about the pandemic to be, so I think that’s an impressive feat. The last third of the book was especially strong. Overall, I think this was a successful portrayal of a very specific type of online, Gen-Z leftist, and I liked her transformation over the course of the novel. I related to Rishi’s expansion of political consciousness, and the way she loved others fiercely in a way that wasn’t aways accepted well. I think Rishi's relationship with her mom was one of the strongest elements of the book, though I wish that had been a little bit more present in the latter half. Ultimately I would recommend it, but only to certain friends who I know wouldn’t find the characters too annoying.

[Kellie Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing cover and she wrote a shout out to the painter in the intro letter of the ARC which made me an instant fan of them both. I think the strongest part was the style, I loved the format especially with the dialogue. Tons of highlight-able lines, and this was the first time I’ve seen Gen Z depicted in a serious and literary way. Excited to read what she comes out with next!

[Naori · Rating 2 out of 5]

This advanced reader’s copy provided by NetGalley.

Thank you NetGalley and MacMillan Audio for this advance reader’s audiobook of Malavika Kannan’s novel Unprecedented Times in exchange for an honest review. My words are my own.

This novel is a stream of consciousness narrative detailing the central character Rishi’s experiences from the summer before her freshman year of college until shortly after she turns twenty. Rishi is an Indian-American freshman at Stanford University whose college career gets derailed by COVID and complicated by multiple relationships. The book is a linear play by play of the events and emotions Rishi experiences throughout that timeline. The character repeatedly forwards the question: does all writing have to have meaning or can meaning be found in just the act of writing itself? As the main character is also a writer asking this question, it seems this is a meta-narrative whereby the author is asking this question as well.

My answer as a reader, reviewer, writer and professor is yes: writing is deeply valuable just for the performance of engaging in it, and meaning can be sought in the ascribed words later. However, this is a published piece of writing that is being marketed as fiction, not as memoir or journalistic. For that reason, the meandering stream of consciousness format that is used for the purpose of asking questions and listening to the echoes, isn’t really what some people would define as a novel. The format may not make sense as a work of fiction, but that definition is of course subjective. Many reviewers have talked about the dissonance between Gen Z communication and other writing. However, this is not the only time that we have gone through a renaissance of writing style wherein free verse shakes up the literary community, and does so successfully. I am thinking of recent YA works by young women of color that are written entirely in poetic verse. I don’t think alternative writing styles aren’t capable of success. However, even stream of consciousness observatory narratives fall apart if there is not clean writing, good editing, and a wariness about repetition.

Rather than try to understand this piece based on genre I’m turning to authorial perspective. The main character repeatedly suggests that she is narrating all of her experiences for her best friend in order to examine them. She is questioning her experiences in order to better understand herself and the world she is living in. I believe this is her stated “thesis”. However, I struggled with the continuity of the fictional character’s persona and the conclusions she made. She was a serious environmental activist, had some very mature experiences politically, is surrounded by queer people of color (many of them second generation), and is taking some pretty academically alternative courses at Stanford. So part of why this didn’t work for me is because I couldn’t believe how few connections she was able to make regarding her privilege, the motivations of her mother’s behavior, how much class dissonance was happening around her, etc. If this was an average 18 year old who had been sheltered with none of these experiences, I’d understand if they were oblivious to these things. However to have a character like this, hundreds of pages into the book, still be blind to why her friend wants to split a bill when their family survives on a taxi cab business? It was very incongruous. This was also true of her summations of her mother’s anxieties; as she reflects on the ways her immigrant mother’s life is vastly different from hers she still never comprehends her behavior. The author also compiles a definition of love based on her mother’s actions toward her: waiting up at night, showing belonging, calling her daily, cooking for her - the type of consistency she doesn’t find in others. However, her conclusions seem off base; she is exploring her sexuality with multiple partners because her mother couldn’t, or she is living a very liberal, repercussion-free life because her mother’s was restricted. I had a hard time understanding how a character with this much exposure to diversity and political consciousness wouldn’t make the connection that her family’s discontent with her choice to leave college and live on a farm was because two generations before her sacrificed greatly to get away from hand-to-mouth living. In fact, none of her group of friends made the clear conclusion that historically and currently, people who farm do not have social mobility or wealth. I generally just struggled with the believability of this character/cast of characters and their lack of growth throughout the book. In terms of the narrator, Tara Raani, she couldn’t have sold the voice of a teenage, self observant, often dramatic young woman any better. Inflection, incredulity, passion, vocal inflection - it was all there. I initially thought the author herself was reading it.

So, I don’t believe Hanan’s writing is revolutionary because it depicts the style of her generation. I do agree that this is a book that will resonate with some readers more than others because it is very personal and very specific. This book doesn’t allow the reader to have the distance that most fiction does in order to imagine a world. This feels like memoir writing; you either identify with the character on a personal level from your own experience and communicate style, or you don’t. Publishing a long book simply to figure out which is more important, the experience of writing or the narrative itself, is a gamble. However, if this was an experiment in that alone, it could’ve been successful with a clearer preposition, more decisive writing and editorial clarity.

I do want to make this clause in my review: this is a writer publishing professionally at the age of 17. I highly doubt that the community of people, myself included, who are reviewing her work have done that. If I were to look back at my writing at her age I would cringe at what it sounded like. While I wouldn’t recommend this book to others, I certainly celebrate this writer’s emergent possibilities, and I look forward to seeing how her writing develops. Hannan is doing something hardly any of her reviewers could do and it is much easier to write a review than it is to write a book. We need to be honest; unless the audience for this book is Helen Oyeyemi and the few other 17-year-old authors, we are all pretty much high school athletes judging a bronze medal Olympian. With the amount of experience, education and practice she’s had, I don’t doubt in time Kannan will take home the gold.

[Jessica Woodbury · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars. I can't tell if the way I feel about this book is more about me than it is about the book. I am getting older. The Bildungsroman stays around the same age. One thing I can say is that the marketing for this book as "the voice of Gen Z" is not a great idea, does no one remember how this backfired for Lena Dunham? And she was joking. Also this book didn't really feel very Gen Z to me at all. Then again, what do I know? I am the parent of a Gen Z child, so I'm not a great source. (And anyone in Gen Z should probably ignore my review! I have no idea how it will feel to you!)

This is the kind of questioning I kept having with myself as I read this book. Of course I cannot speak to the extent that Kannan represents her age group. But I can speak to it as a novel. The Bildungsroman does not need the same kind of structure most novels have. It is often a little aimless, because it is supposed to show youth and life and how unpredictable coming of age can be. What troubles me is how in this book Rishi doesn't seem to grow or mature much at all beyond one very simple thing: she realizes that life is not what she expected, that you cannot simply decide on a narrative and then live it. That is a pretty low bar for a bildungsroman, and honestly it's a pretty low bar for Rishi, they are both capable of better.

This is a novel where things "happen" but they do not actually happen. Rishi goes to college but college is just friends and dating. Rishi goes back home to quarantine but quarantine is just no friends and no dating. Rishi goes more places where there is friends and dating. Rishi takes only one class, as far as we know. She does not seem to ever study or do homework or be interested academic except that she be dubbed a good writer. Rishi goes through the covid pandemic and seems truly detached from the fact that something bad is happening to the world and people are dying. She does not seem to have any anxiety about it impacting herself or the people she loves or just the world generally. She is nonchalant about safety for herself and others. Rishi goes to a farm and we get about 3 pages of what it is like to work on a farm and then it is basically never mentioned again. Rishi suddenly is cooking dinner for a dozen people every day even though she's never been responsible for cooking anything at all and it's fine and not something we spend any time on except when Rishi is having a conversation while she cooks. The whole book is like this. Things happen but they don't HAPPEN. The things that should count as life are treated like a setting, we get a brief description and then we don't talk about it again. It's a very strangely detached novel, and for people who were and are Covid-conscious it's going to be more than a little maddening. (The talks about it as a Great Covid Novel have a very different definition of what that would be than I do.)

I almost quit this book several times. I'm still not sure why I kept going. Rishi can be a witty narrator, but the longer you stay with this book the more you want Rishi to get a hold of herself. Her relationship with her roommate is, it turns out, the center of the book in most ways. But it remains entirely unresolved and wraps up with a couple very quick endings.

And I found the last section of the book really troubling. Sexual assault as the singular event at the end of the book was a strange choice. Especially since it comes from a situation in a long-established pattern of behavior where Rishi is codependent and passive-aggressive with women, and self-destructive with men. The ending comes so quickly after the assault that we don't have an opportunity to consider this pattern. Rishi doesn't get a chance to consider much of anything except her own fallibility and fragility. It's such an odd place to end the story. And puts so much emphasis on this terrible thing without much consideration of healing. It is almost like the book is saying now adulthood has begun, which made me feel really weird.

Rishi's approach to so many things she finds important also felt off to me. Her activism, her queerness, these are things she claims as central, but they do not feel like things she really cares about. We hear a lot about her past as a climate activist, but we do not hear a single thing about Rishi being concerned about the climate once she stops posting about it for engagement. Was this a personality she put on? It's hard to say! Because, again, the novel is not very focused on Rishi growing or learning about herself, solving any major problems, except for the big turns at the end.

And yes, if you are an older reader you will find moments where it is VERY obvious that the author is under 25. (I found this a lot in last year's NOTES ON INFINITY, too. These books are basically a Harvard/Stanford pair up. Apparently we only publish young authors if they go to the Ivy League.) This book does not understand the world or life after college in ways that are quite clear to anyone 35 or older. (Easiest example is Larkin, who is 29, and has somehow had time to have an entire consulting career, an entire period of burnout from that consulting career, and also successfully build an entire coop farm that is several years into operation. Again, he is 29.)

How much of the ease with which these characters move through the world is privilege and how much is youth's ignorance? Hard to say. But I really should have stuck to my early gut and not finished this book, since I only got more frustrated as it went on. I can still read a Bildungsroman, but I think there's a reason the most famous versions were written well after their authors went through that coming of age period.

[Chelsi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank you to Goodreads Giveaways for the ARC.

2.25 ✨ Lordddd. I’m tired of this grandpa.

It took me forever to read this. It started out pretty good and the writing definitely has promise. But damn. I wanted to DNF about halfway through and only finished because I was given the ARC. I wanted to be able to provide an honest review. But at what cost!? This put me in a reading slump 😭

This book is EXTREMELY Gen Z and leans into that a little too hard. There is a wry, self-aware humor that initially made this angle bearable. However, it gets old the more you read. This is also a very "woke" book and the topics that are brought up and discussed do not feel organic. I am aware the author is writing from a lens of auto fiction, so she is clearly pulling from her own experiences. However, a lot of this just read like a laundry list of controversial topics and hot-button buzz words for the sake of being "on trend."

This book was genuinely exhausting to read. I tried to give it the benefit of the doubt, but goddamn it just became a whiny, entitled, Gen-Z virtue signaling mess. There is way too much thought-vomit and it reads more like a teenage girl's diary than a fully structured novel, even if it is auto-fiction. I actually really enjoyed the beginning of the book and the setup with Rishi starting college, her first experience being away from her parents, finding her self and her writing voice. That was all great! It was funny and I was interested in her journey as a person. There were a few annoying, pick-me lines here and there, but for the most part I was fully on board and wanted to see where everything was going.

But once the Covid storyline hit (and granted, maybe this was intentional from the author) everything became a serious slog. And not just a slog, but Rishi's voice became increasingly irritating. She sounded like a such a brat I swear to god. No one understood her and everything was horrible. She hates her parents, she hates her ancestors, she hates Florida and America, she hates men, she hates straight people, she hates capitalism, she hates her privilege, but she hates white people the most because they have more privilege. It was honestly so tiring to read. It's like the author ran down a list of liberal talking points and checked them off as she went along. It didn't seem genuine at all and if it was, then this is a group of people I would hate to hang out with lmao. The way Georgia spoke during their fights?? Literally kill me.

Rishi as a person was also awful! She was so self centered and all she did was talk. She didn't actually do anything to understand or sympathize with anyone around her. She didn't take action against all the evils she went on and on about. She actually seemed to have a really obtuse viewpoint when it came to the world and what people have to do to survive in it. Especially immigrants! She came across extremely young and naive, and being in her head was pretty unpleasant. I just wanted to roll my eyes every time she got up on her soapbox about something, but then offered no alternative or the most idiotic idea ever. It's like she was just regurgitating those intentionally inflamatory Twitter posts that are made just to get the comment sections flowing with vitriol. It was not realistic and it was very close-minded.

The ending was really abrupt and although something bad happened to Rishi, I felt that there was no resolution to her character. She didn’t seem to grow or change or even process what happened to her. It was a disappointing ending, but honestly after the stupid chicken farm, I was just reading to soonish as quickly as possible anyway.

Also, I just could not take this narrative seriously with all of the blatant online speak - the meme references, the angry "fuck that orange guy" rants, the viral anecdotes from Covid, the new-age socialist ideals. Listen, I lived through Covid in Floida and it was the best place to be in my opinion. Her tone and transparent judgements honestly just became so grating. They read very pretentions, immature, and entitled.

Good start and this could have been a worthy autofiction, but I think this author definitely needs to grow some more. If I wanted to read something like this, I'd just scroll through Twitter.

[Isabella Gates · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have extremely mixed feelings on this book. When I started this I immediately was like "woah okay this was my exact life at one point" and that almost turned me away completely. The diverse friend group, running around creating memories, riding your high horse off of little lived life experience. Once I reached the COVID-19 portion of this book, it was tough to keep going because I have SUCH mixed feelings on reading about COVID in fiction having experienced it. I don't want to read about how a character is processing it or reckons with the pandemic and being an individual - I did it myself. That's probably the point as well. As uncomfortable as it made me to relive that experience, I also recognize how universal it was to be a young adult and experience the pandemic and resistance of the early 2020's through your phone in your parent's house. Then, I feel like the novel morphs in to something else completely that I find hard to describe.

Our main characters take their gap year to go and live off the grid with a charming man in his late 20s - I almost expected us to turn a corner in to a psychological thriller, a la Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton. Nope, we just create a pressure cooker for people in their young 20s loaded with therapy speak/buzz words navigating interpersonal conflict and being 'queer' (I also struggle to make heads or tails of how queerness is explored/represented in this book. It seems to be a very juvenile view of queerness which I hope is on purpose. The fluidity of it, throwing around labels to almost one-up somebody else in an identity battle. Imo, an overall immature view of sex/sexuality/sexual identity which again, I can only hope is purposeful). The conflict eventually comes to a head, white girl gets weird and uses a poor excuse to have a friend breakup. While Georgia's breakup is just as confusing to me, I was kind of disappointed to see that how she communicated the friend breakup be chopped up to her being white and cultural differences navigating conflict. I can recognize cultural differences in how conflict is recognized and handled, but in this story in particular, I feel like it is moreso because of immaturity than actual cultural differences. Rishi, your mother is a narcissist and struggles to healthily handle conflict and you felt slightly triggered by Georgia's navigation of conflict. It isn't an us vs them situation. Again - probably speaking to the immaturity of the characters.

I had somewhat high hopes for when Rishi and the reader move to New York - yay! maybe we can get some writing done, explore who we want to be a bit more. Nope. Repeating similar cycles, not writing at all, typical "lost in your 20s in a major city" plot. It just fell flat for me. And then you get sexual assault thrown in at the end for little to no thematic payoff. It felt completely unnecessary and comes in so late.

Another thing that isn't lost on me in this story is how Rishi kind of stumbles through the world politically in college. You get vignettes of her as a young climate activist, and then hops on a train to cancel a man she singled out and seduced to lose her virginity to consensually. It really throw me how quick she was to also start dogging on him and almost savor his internet cancellation when she! picked! him! and from her descriptions, it wasn't assault, just a bad lay. It makes the actual assault at the end of the book that much more uncomfortable for me.

So yeah, I'm not sure what to think or say on this book. Makes me understand gen z pessimism more (having experienced it). I think it loses its way and we just witness the main character repeat cycles, never learning, never really growing. Maybe that's the point. I feel like I'm reading this 5 years too late. I guess excellent characterization, just wish it was used in a better story. This book is almost satirical to me, and I'm scared that wasn't the intention.

Recommend to people who were born 1998-2002 if you want to re experience the pandemic, fans of The Idiot by Elif Batuman and Writers and Lovers by Lilly King, and anyone who was the one woke kid at their suburban high school

[AT · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book should, by all accounts, be for me, a gay Indian-American woman who was studying the humanities at a prestigious university during the breakout of the COVID-19 pandemic. This book is, tragically, not for me. My pedigree of demographics can assure you: my problem is not with the events that unfold through the eyes of Rishi, our narrator. My issue isn't the plot; it's the prose.

This is autofiction that's far too autofiction-y for my liking. Perhaps one of my problems is with the categorization of this book as "literary," an adjective that evokes refinement, when it reads like a recent college grad's diary. It feels like it was streamed right out of a 20-year-old brain and bottled at the source. This lack of artfulness could be interesting, and I'm not a hater of pithiness nor concision. But there's nothing in the way of thematic atmosphere surrounding these short, punchy sentences to make them interesting, so the onus falls on the diction. I just reread Garielle Lutz's masterful "The Sentence is a Lonely Place," and in reading this book, I found myself longing for beautiful sentences. For rhythm, for assonance. This is not just a problem with Unprecedented Times; this is the type of autofiction debut that publishers have been stacking up for years, and I'm fatigued. And maybe I'm especially affected because I can maintain a cool distance from the white Bushwick divas and the straight Chicago lit bros writing their own curt, stream-of-consciousness narratives. This, however, is the first time I'm feeling this way about a book about someone who looks and acts exactly like me.

More things I didn't care for: A lot of the humor just doesn't land for me. The millennial-ish "punchable white men" stuff, "This is fine" dog meme stuff. These are things I tolerate in real life but don't need in a piece of literary fiction, even if it is period-accurate. There are also puzzling portions which are neither clearly satire nor necessarily a reflection of the narrator's character flaws, after which her narration continues to move on at a breakneck pace. (I'm thinking about the choking paragraph (which is reprised during a very dark, serious moment, so surely it couldn't have been comedic?), the eating-disorder dialogue, the conversation with Larkin in front of the refrigerator, and the Boccaccio invocation.) I was also confused by the narrator repeatedly saying she's prettier than her love interests, describing them as unattractive. This is an odd statement to reiterate, but the book pushes us to take it at face value, and doesn't unpack it or use it to build up a flaw in Rishi (that she will never meaningfully confront within these pages).

Some things I liked: the epistolary segments and format changes, which felt especially useful in an internality-heavy book like this. The letters and emails used some quite lovely tonal shifts out of the narrator's mental register and into her correspondence register, which I thought was well executed. I enjoyed a lot of the family stuff and found the coming out scene and post-coming out fallout especially relatable. The characterization of the parents is very careful and precise. There are some nice observational moments that start building up once Rishi moves to New York — I liked the laundering of the thrifted sweaters and the anxiety of cooking for Kavya, for instance.

The final section of the book, after the assault, is by far the strongest. This portion has some thoughtful prose, well-constructed sentences, bits of musicality, and nicely-placed references to literary figures. This is the part of Unprecedented Times that had me wishing for more meat, more thematic bulk, more critical engagement — but then it just ended! On, may I say, a very confusingly meta promise that the narrator would take some time to process and think deeply about her life events before writing any more. I just wish this book had demonstrated more of that thinking process.

Thanks to Holt for the ARC!

[Blake · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has occurred to me that I am existing in a period of time in which the books I choose to read are both inspiring and maiming me. My last read, P. Paramita’s Appetite broke my heart within the narrative that so many Asians experience with their mothers. It also inspired me. It reminded me, in my bones, that I am Korean, that I love to cook, and that food connects me to the motherlands like nothing else can.

Malavika Kannan has done this, too, with Unprecedented Times.

I was not a high school or college student at the beginning of the lockdown. In fact, my college career started online after a much-needed gap year, and the lockdown taught me to retreat deep down within myself that I temporarily lost the ability to socialize. That was in 2020. I have tried school again twice since, but COVID taught me that I do not have the discipline to make myself show up to classes every day, to sit down and do the homework. This all said, I do not think I understand Rishika entirely – she goes to Stanford, lives in a dorm. I went to a community college, stayed in my father’s home.

But we are both children of Asian women who want us to do something with our lives that makes us the most money, that has the flashiest, most successful degree. Rishi and I both love the English language down to our bones. We love the art of shaping sentences, of turning our life experiences into something tangible for others to relate to.

I can also see how Kannan is just like Rishi and me. I do not know how her relationship with her mother has or has not shaped the way she writes and moves through life, but I know that she was put on this planet by something bigger than any of us with at least one very specific task: go forth and write.

To say that I was nervous for Unprecedented Times is an understatement. I am so terribly anal. The lack of quotation marks nearly did me in, nearly made me want to explode. I learned very quickly that this style of storytelling is far more immersive than I could have ever realized, and that by choosing to omit the quotation marks, Kannan has allowed us as readers to sit alongside Rishika as she tells us her story. It felt less like reading a book than it did telepathy (Rishika and Georgia reference – I had to).

And now I am here, both maimed and inspired. I stayed up until almost 6 in the morning trying to finish this, forcing myself to keep reading until I was dozing off over my e-reader. At some point, though, I got up to pee and the movement woke me. I sat in my bed in the pitch black and wrote something for my own novel for the first time in months. 287 words more than I had before. It’s not a lot, but when you’re inspired by prose as beautiful as Kannan’s in Unprecedented Times, there’s nothing you can do but let the words flow.

What you will come to find in Unprecedented Times and in the few years of Rishi’s life that we are bystanders to is pieces of yourself. You will find pieces of yourself in the all-consuming way Rishi loves, in her friends, in her relationship with her parents, and in the way she views men. I found myself in her queerness, in her mother’s blade, in how everything and everyone she lets go of has claw marks permanently carved into them. I felt myself become one with half of Rishika and half of Imraan, and as I sit at work finishing this review, I am realizing that I will think of Rishi and Georgia for years to come.

Malavika Kannan might be a literary genius, and I cannot wait to read more of her mind.

Thank you to Henry Holt & Company and NetGalley for the opportunity to read Unprecedented Times early in exchange for an honest review. This has been rated 5/5 stars across the three book review platforms I use (The StoryGraph, Pagebound, and Goodreads).

[Alice · Rating 2 out of 5]

This review is for an ARC given out through Netgalley.

[Spoilers ahead]

I did not enjoy this book, and I really think that it was the sort of book I would enjoy based on how much I initially have in common with the protagonist. I also went to school for writing in the Bay Area in 2019, and am still living with how jarring it was to go through the pandemic while living someplace new and trying to connect with people while living through that distancing time.

But I quickly became annoyed with Rishi being so self centered. She goes through the entire book expecting people to read her mind and getting upset with anyone who doesn’t make her their entire focus. And even when people try to lovingly check her and have a conversation, she pushes them away as soon as they stop being the perfect person she needs them to be. And despite thinking about herself all the time since the main pov is in her head, I never saw any true self reflection of growth. I wanted to stop reading this book several times but stuck it through hoping there would be some growth at the end that would make all her struggles to connect worth the read, but I was disappointed. She is a user that feels like the world owes her everything she can grab and more, but gives very little back to the people who love her.

Rishi self indentifies as a lesbian very early in the novel, and maintains that as her label despite choosing to sleep almost exclusivly with men because they are “easier” to find and seduce. It allows her to have dissociative sex without having to develop the deeper relationships that she feels she would need to have with women. And that is a really interesting character trait and says a lot about her fear of emotional intimacy, but there never is really any deep reflection on that from her. I would have loved to see that dynamic of her explored more deeply but we only ever skim the surface.

On a craft level, I think that the decision to leave off quotation marks in dialogue was a poor one. It makes it come across as if this is meant to be some literary fiction style Bildungsroman, but the lack of growth in the main character and the relativly short period of her life that we visit just doesn’t live up to that. This is a fairly typical first time at college/away from an strict household story that leans hard on the Pandemic to give itself more weight, but also can’t resist dated references to memes to inject a bit of comedy.

I think that SA scene was very well written, and showed a different type of disassociation from Rishi’s consensual encounters that was very well down and heartbreaking. But also as the narrative was leading there I was rolling my eyes because it was so close to the end of the book I knew there wouldn’t be any satisfactory reflection or long term impact on her character that we would get to explore. If it had happened earlier it would have been interesting to see how that affected her promiscuity. Would she have become sex adverse? Or thrown herself into even more dangerous sexual situations to reclaim control? Though she has sex one more time after that with her female roommate, it is just a continuation of their already established and toxic dynamic.
Sorry for any details I might have missed, I read this over a month ago and wanted to wait until I had cooled down a bit before actually reviewing it.

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honestly? I really loved this book. I'm maybe not the target audience demographically, but spiritually? Yes. I think this is going to hit for those folks who want a more young version of "weird girl lit" (without horror elements) with a queer and South Asian messy, self-searching protagonist who's toxic to herself and friends sometimes while she's learning how to human in a world outside her small town Florida). Rishi's messy! And I love that! Mostly unapologetically messy, finding clever ways to defend her actions all the time (even though we as readers probably know better but what's a 19 year old doing except constantly self-searching for self-identity? Whether that's as "I think I'm a lesbian, but I'm exploring the data points (by doing one-night stands with men)," or falling desperately in love with your best friend in a way that's so true to the queer female experience or having your heart broken by a vaunted teacher's critique or, especially, the complex relationship with your mother where you want the bare minimum, if that, to do with her and her smothering ways until those moments when you just want your mother. Even though I'm not like Rishi outside of being queer and from the United States, it's (unfortunately) extremely relatable in those feelings of needing to be separate from your family, and the very intense friendships a young queer person has that border, and cross the border, outside of friendship. This is also the book I'd recommend first, without pause, when trying to explain to people what "bisexual homoromantic" means.

I think it's not so much A COVID Book as one might expect - we know Rishi and her college experience for a full year before those events of March 2020 and what follows, and of course we get to and through that, but the story is WELL underway by then. Even those long months themselves feel like a much smaller part of the story - Stanford closes, Rishi's at home, Rishi and her friends are more or less isolated on a homestead farm (less trad wife more, poly commune that the kids don't really get involved with thankfully), one person in the story is affected health-wise but from a distance, mostly - I know some friends who are straight up like, "I don't want to read any book that mentions/involves COVID yet" so this is your warning - it's contemporary fiction that doesn't ignore it, but it's also much less than expected with what goes on during that year and a half-ish.

What was the huge standout to me in this novel was the NARRATION. Tara Raani was FANTASTIC, code switching in every available opportunity between cynical Rishi, her immigrant parents, her white roommate/best friend/her queer friends/her more 'posh' friend from India, et cetera. It was more than just a lovely set of accents in my ears, but a whole style of speaking and really just vibe brought to each character. Adding to my: I will listen to anything narrated by you list.

tl;dr this was great, greatest probably in audio, happy to be here. Thank you to Macmillan Audio for the ALC for review!

[Toby Ward · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unprecedented Times by Malavika Kannan

2☆

Thank you to NetGalley, Macmillan Audio, and Malavika Kannan for an ALC in exchange for an honest review.

What a completely frustrating experience. I enjoyed the farm co-op chapters the most, but besides that, there isn't much here for me. Maybe because I'm older than Rishi, and was a working-class essential worker during covid, so i don't recognize those lonely empty-year feelings. I do, however, remember being a shitty 19 year old. Rishi is so cruel, vindictive, selfish, and manipulative to her entire friend group i genuinely couldn't stand her. She constantly does mean, terrible things to people and excuses her actions at every turn, and expects everyone else to give her a pass too. She does cruel things and blames her victims for being upset. The only problems she cares about at all are her own. She uses her friends as props. She has no growth. She just gets worse.

I too had a toxic codependent best-friendship in my teen years, where i was the taker and she was my default-therapist, but unlike Rishi and Georgia, we're still friends to this day because I actually listened to her concerns and grew as a person. I apologized and worked hard to even out our friendship because I love her and I wanted her to be in my life for my whole life. Rishi just blames Georgia for how she feels and makes it everyone else's problem. She never even tries to understand how her actions effect other people, not even the people she claims to love. I usually enjoy complicated, unlikable characters, but it didn't feel purposeful with Rishi. I feel like the author thought Rishi was likable, or at the least, sympathetic.

I just could not wait for this to be over. The book got so much more interesting in the last 30% but ends abruptly with any chance for growth cut off. I know that this is autofiction, and that the author is still young herself. I think she wrote this story way too soon. This needed another 10 or 15 years to simmer. This needed a better editor. She has so much technical talent as a writer, but everything dragged, and the meme references were dated even by the time COVID hit. I also hated the way she talked about her activism work. I'm disappointed that I didn't love this, because from the description I thought I would, but the total lack of any growth or reflection from Rishi was just too frustrating.

On the plus side, the audio narration by Tara Raani was excellent and very vibrant. I hope that Kannan will grow into her work and her experiences more as time goes on, because her prose was good and she's barely even in her mid 20's. I may revist her work in a decade or so, and I wish her all the best.