Misconception: A Novel - Softcover

"Ryan Boudinot will make you love characters even when they are being despicable and foolish, and he writes about relationships in a way that is perceptive, honest, and refreshing. But there is something more going on. Misconception is a book riven with insight, humor, and style. And it is among the finest debuts I have ever read." -- Stephen Elliott "Misconception takes on the question of truth in storytelling, as well as matters of the heart, and the mysteries of coming into one's own, all with a sensitivity and intelligence that is truly moving, and a sense of humor that, page after page, will warm your cockles. A gem of a first novel." -- Charles Bock "A comic symphony--a story with side-splitting action, treacherous wit, and vise-grip lyricism . . . Here, bleak is beautiful, and lucid, lovable characters jump into your arms. Misconception gives fresh voice to our most important American secrets." -- Maria Flook "Ryan Boudinot's tragic narrators, Cedar and Kat, deliver a rollicking tour of adolescence that pivots on a gasp. Misconception is as twisted as watching your own sperm swim under the microscope in biology class and as irresistible as a twenty-year secret about sex, death, and paternity." -- Aimee Liu

Cedar Rivers is on a strange errand. A doctor sidelined into the strange world of the first dot-com boom, he has come to Albany, New York, in between business in Iceland and home in Silicon Valley, to meet a woman he hasn't seen in twenty years. Then a Chuck Taylor-shod proto-Goth with chipped black nail polish, Kat is now a literary up-and-comer who needs Cedar to vet her memoir--an account of the summer they were sweethearts. As if that weren't enough, she's written parts of it from his point of view. Through an intense weekend in a snowed-in motel room, Cedar and Kat relive their most painful memories: Before they had a chance at first love, Kat's mother and her new fianc dragged Kat off on a family trip. Kat returned with a secret, one which--when she shared it with Cedar--set off a series of drastically miscalculated assumptions that dominoed into a moment of startling tragedy. Misconception is a startlingly original debut novel--a smart and provocative coming-of-age story, and a fresh and witty comment on the unreliability of memory and storytelling--that establishes Ryan Boudinot as one of the most promising talents of his generation.