A review by bookishpixiereads
Now Is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson

dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

“Now is Not the Time to Panic” is a coming of age story about two teens in a small town in Tennessee in the mid 1990s. Sixteen-year-old Frankie becomes friends with Zeke who is only in town for the summer.  Both are kind of loners and feel like they don’t fit in with their peers.  And both of their family lives are a mess.  

The two are artists in their own right.  Frankie writes and Zeke draws.  They decide to create art together and release it into the world without telling anyone.  The piece they create is a little cryptic and weird, but actually quite innocent.  But the town completely misinterprets it.  Other teens make up an origin story for the art and that story sweeps the town.  Literal chaos ensues.

But back to the present day and Frankie is now in her 30s when she receives a call from a reporter wanting to talk about that time in the 90s.  She freaks out because she doesn’t know how this reporter knows.  She lives with this everyday, but also very privately everyday.  The novel jumps back and forth from mainly the story in the 90s and to her reconciling what happened in the present day.

A lot of this story feels very internal.  I thought about how this could be adapted into a film.  And I imagined that it would it be very hard, because so much of Frankie’s internal dialogue is about her private thoughts and about the secret.  It would have to be a lot of narration.

This one is a hard one for me to review because I adored Wilson’s “Nothing to See Here,” but I just couldn’t connect with this story for reasons that I cannot explain.  I can’t really technically fault the book for anything.  I wish it ended differently, but I also didn’t hate it. It was just not my preference. But yeah…

Objectively, I feel like this could be 4 Stars, but subjectively, I can only give it 3 Stars. 
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