Now is Not the Time to Panic

Over the course of one hot southern summer, teenagers Frankie and Zeke bond over their mutual “weirdness” and decide that what they want is to create art. “We didn’t understand how normal this was, to be young, to believe that you were destined to make beautiful things.” She comes up with a mysterious phrase that he illustrates into a poster. Then, with the aid of a hidden Xerox machine, they secretly make hundreds of copies and plaster them all over their small town of Coalfield, Tennessee.

They love sharing this secret together: a secret that will shape their lives beyond anything they could have imagined, one that will—for a brief time—make Coalfield become a place that matters to other people. But Frankie discovers “how hard it was to walk through the day when you had an obsession and you couldn’t say a word about it.”

As in Kevin Wilson’s other novels, the book is peopled with indelible, often hilarious, characters, including Frankie’s brothers, who are huge, destructive triplets, and her recently divorced, distracted mother. Wilson renders adolescence perfectly: that intense time of absolute certainty, painful insecurity, and the passionate pursuit of vague, inarticulate dreams. Highly recommended.