Me and Mr. Booker

Restlessness pervades Taylor’s debut novel of suburban claustrophobia and the difficulty of cutting ties to even an unhappy home. “Everyone in it was like me, trying to move on and start something, anything at all, even if it was almost certain to go bad,” explains 16-year-old narrator Martha. Like the town’s other residents, she drinks copiously and waits for something to happen that will give color to her humdrum life. She finds Mr. Booker, a smooth-talking Englishman, who, fueled by mutual feelings of being trapped and bored with life, begins an affair with her made all the easier by his wife’s proclivity for falling asleep in a boozy haze. After years of watching her father manipulate her mother and having an outsider status at school, Martha feels like her life has finally begun. Meanwhile, her mother throws parties to “get her through the weekends” and her father becomes increasingly unstable, prompting the return of her aloof older brother, Eddie. Taylor’s straightforward prose captures the nuances of being at an age where you cannot see the differences between being a teenager and being an adult. Unfortunately, the characters, although well-drawn, are forgettable, and the novel leaves only impressions of discontent. Agent: Nathaniel Jacks, Inkwell Management. (Jan.)