The Knockout Queen

February 3, 2020
Thorpe’s fierce third novel (after Dear Fang, with Love) observes the development of and challenges to an intense friendship between two outcasts at a Southern California high school in the early 2010s. Michael, gay and closeted, has lived in a shabby house with his aunt and cousin since he was 11, when his mother was sent to prison for nonfatally stabbing his father. In the mansion next door lives Bunny Lambert, an immature volleyball star who desperately wants a boyfriend and, at 6‘3“ at the end of her junior year, fears she is a “complete monster.” While Bunny copes with an alcoholic father and bullying by her classmates, Michael hooks up with guys he meets online. Neighbors and classmates since middle school, Bunny and Michael don’t meet until 10th grade, and their friendship develops as Bunny explores her “girliness” around Michael, while he can “practice being gay.” When students start gossiping about Michael, Bunny pummels one of the girls hard enough to cause a critical injury. While the novel’s plot is thin and rests perhaps too heavily on the dire consequences of this moment of violence, the two central characters are deeply realized and complex. The result cannily dissects the power and limits of adolescent friendship. Agent: Molly Friedrich, Friedrich Agency.

March 1, 2020

When his mother is sent to prison for stabbing his abusive father, Michael, 11, is sent to live with his Aunt DeeDee. Next-door neighbor Bunny Lampert is the rich princess of North Shore. She lost her mother in a car accident, and her father is an alcoholic and crooked real estate developer. During high school, the athletic girl who wants for nothing and closeted gay boy who lives a frugal life become best friends, finding common ground in a lack of adult supervision and painful home lives in the California suburbs. As Bunny grows taller and focuses on volleyball and a dream of Olympic greatness, Michael meets up with men from Craigslist and begins a part-time job. An act of violent loyalty to Michael, who is bullied, throws Bunny into a legal battle she and her father are unprepared to fight. The resulting violence forces Michael to change his life and focus on his future. VERDICT Thorpe's (Dear Fang, with Love) coming-of-age tale set against a backdrop filled with hate and violence will captivate readers with its brutal honesty and unbreakable bonds of friendship. Recommended for fans of Emma Straub and Jami Attenberg.--Laura Jones, Indiana State Library, Indianapolis

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2020
Michael and Bunny were next-door neighbors before they became friends: he lived in a rundown stucco cottage with his aunt and cousin, while she lived in a mansion with her rich alcoholic father. Bunny is one of the tallest students in their grade and hopes to play volleyball in the Olympics someday. Michael, with his long hair and eyeliner, tries to learn more about himself and his sexuality by secretly meeting other men through Craigslist. Bunny and Michael's friendship begins in tenth grade after she catches him smoking in her yard, and they become fiercely close. Michael's sexuality becomes the hot topic of the malicious gossip at school when he starts dating an older man, spurring Bunny to make a violent choice that alters their futures forever. Thorpe, author of Dear Fang, With Love (2016) and The Girls from Corona Del Mar (2014), writes with savage poignancy as she explores identity, adolescent friendship, and the insatiable longing for intimacy. Her novel is devastatingly honest, her characters vulnerable, and her readers will be spellbound.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

Starred review from February 1, 2020
Thorpe (Dear Fang, With Love, 2016) takes a familiar plotline--a pair of teen misfits form an unlikely but life-altering friendship--and turns it into an arrestingly original, darkly comic meditation on moral ambiguity. After his mother goes to prison for stabbing his violent father with a fruit knife, Michael moves in with his aunt in the idyllic Southern California suburb of North Shore, and it is there he meets Bunny Lampert. "She was the princess of North Shore," he recalls, from the vantage of adulthood, "and somehow, almost against my will, I became her friend." Bunny is a somewhat unlikely princess: a tall, tall volleyball star with a dead mother, an affably sleazy father, and the overdeveloped abs of a Ninja Turtle. Michael, meanwhile, is a gay, long-haired, septum-pierced high achiever with a secret relationship with a much older man and an after-school job at Rite Aid. What they have in common, besides geographic proximity, traumatic childhoods, and a general lack of adult supervision, is a failure to fit into the prescribed roles of gender identity: "as often as I was failing to pass as a straight boy...Bunny was failing to pass as a girl." This is not only because she is big--6-feet-3-inches and 200 pounds by the end of junior year--but also happy and confident, a "combination of qualities," Michael notes, people found "displeasing in a young woman." And it is exactly these qualities that will do Bunny in, in a single moment of violence that feels both shocking and predestined, forever changing both their lives. But there are no victims here and no heroes, either. In Thorpe's Technicolor world, everyone is an innocent and everyone is culpable and no one is absolved, and the result is a novel both nauseatingly brutal and radically kind. Brilliantly off-kilter and vibrating with life.

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