If you’re reading this from the Northern Hemisphere, congratulations, we made it; it’s finally summer. Yes, the heat is oppressive and this will almost certainly be “the hottest summer on record” (again), but it’s the mindset of summer I love the most: The days are longer, the pools are open, everyone is slightly more down to clown than usual. And for me, at least, it’s the season of nostalgia. It’s nearly impossible for me to hear the buzz of cicadas and crickets, smell a barbecue, or even just sit sweltering in front of a fan without being filled with nostalgia for my previous summers.
Nostalgia permeates Darrow Farr’s The Bombshell, which is Jezebel’s book club pick for July. It takes place in summer 1993 (a summer I am not old enough to remember) in Corsica (a place I’ve never been), but because nostalgia is more a feeling and less a memory, those are immaterial details. (I recently watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and got intensely nostalgic for high school in the 1980s, a decade in which I did not live! Culture is a hell of a drug.) The era-specific details in The Bombshell evoke this feeling; polaroids, camcorders, TV antennae—the distinct lack of cell phones.
Photo: Pamela Dorman Books; Paul Benson
Farr takes full advantage of her setting, because the plot would be nearly impossible to write in a world with even first-gen iPhones. Séverine Guimard is the daughter of the administrator of Corsica, a French territory in the Mediterranean. She’s been uprooted from her chic life in Paris to spend her last two years of high school in this backwater, and can’t wait to get back to the city of light to begin drama school (though she’d go straight to Los Angeles if her parents would let her; she knows she’ll be a star). She has an obscene dose of self-confidence and considers herself to be extremely sophisticated—especially when it comes to sex—and this combination is borderline insufferable for the first dozen or so pages. (I mean that purely as a compliment to Farr’s ability to recreate the interior monologue of an 18-year-old hottie; in a LitHub essay, she wrote that she wanted to “write a novel about the most extra, delulu teenage girl on the planet, a girl with a literally dangerous amount of confidence.” She succeeded!)
And then, pretty much right away (on page 14 of 406), Séverine is kidnapped on one of her regular nighttime bike trips; stuffed into a car, driven to an impossible-to-find location, and made to stay in a closet for a few days. Her captors are Soffiu di Libertà, a small cell of Corsican separatists, who are seeking 5 million francs (to fund their revolutionary dreams) and the release of their friend. They’ve captured Séverine because of her high-profile father and his connections to the French regime.
Immediately, Séverine’s face is plastered across news channels and papers, which perversely begins to fill her celebrity dreams. She also realizes that her captors are all young men (Tittu, Bruno, and Petru; one close to her age, two others in their mid-20s) who are (somewhat) true believers in Marxist revolution, actually kind of sweethearts (despite the whole kidnapping thing), and not at all bad looking. Over the course of her first three weeks of captivity, she goes from trapped in the closet to half-heartedly attending Soffiu di Libertà’s daily workouts and study sessions (Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth blows her privileged teenaged mind) to full-scale joining the movement and becoming the face of Soffiu di Libertà—complete with sending the media polaroids of her wearing all black and holding a huge gun. With all these dynamics at play (and Séverine’s whole-hearted belief in herself as a singular bombshell), there is one flirtation and one full-blown affair; she also begins helping to plan and conduct Soffiu di Libertà’s attacks.
If you’re getting shades of Patty Hearst, that’s not an accident. Farr wrote in LitHub that she’s long been “fascinated” by “the idea of Patty Hearst, the bogeyman she represented … Here was a wealthy, educated young woman who would risk it all for a once-in-a-lifetime thrill, who was capable of denouncing her family’s bourgeois values and dedicating herself to the liberation of the oppressed.”
Séverine does this to some extent, but her exact level of commitment to revolution remains an open question. Farr threads this needle well; Séverine certainly doesn’t have Stockholm Syndrome and her mind is truly blown by realizing the full extent of inequality and her own indirect role in perpetuating it. But she’s also young and naive, and there are multiple moments where someone openly questions whether or not she’s more dedicated to the movement, to her own image of herself, or to impressing her lover, the de-facto intellectual leader of the cell. It’s never really clear, and that is in large part to Farr’s credit. No one does anything for one single reason, especially not at 18, an age when you change daily even in the most normal of circumstances—which Séverine’s are decidedly not.
The flashes of 1990s life—fighting over which cassette tape to play in the car; dialing from payphones at the side of the road; people getting their news once a day (!) from actual newspapers (!!)—happening in the landscape of a beautiful, beachy summer over 30 years ago are a cozy, somewhat conflicting backdrop to this action-packed story. But this setting heightens the romance of the novel, which, to be fair, played on my preexisting sympathies. I’m not sure I could’ve built bombs as a teenager, but participating in a movement that you believe will lead to real change? Being led by a hot revolutionary who’s not totally an asshole? Achieving minor (if irrevocable) fame? What 18-year-old could say no?
Like what you just read? You’ve got great taste. Subscribe to Jezebel, and for $5 a month or $50 a year, you’ll get access to a bunch of subscriber benefits, including getting to read the next article (and all the ones after that) ad-free. Plus, you’ll be supporting independent journalism—which, can you even imagine not supporting independent journalism in times like these? Yikes.
GET JEZEBEL RIGHT IN YOUR INBOX
Still here. Still without airbrushing. Still with teeth.
