Bringing his delightful sense of humor to teen life in a nowhere, rural town, Kevin Wilson’s Now Is Not the Time to Panic is a worthy successor to his 2021 novel Nothing to See Here, reviewed in this blog (Nothing to See Here, by Kevin Wilson — Marguerite Reads). Frankie is a sixteen-year-old girl living with her loving, somewhat quirky mother and triplet older brothers who are an endless source of chaos, wrestling, drinking, and creating adolescent mayhem. Frankie is generally happy to travel under the radar, a bookish, creative type who has zero exposure to the wider world. It is the beginning of the summer in the nineties, a time before cell phones and the Internet, and for someone like Frankie, living in a boring, disconnected place can feel like endless hell. When she meets Zeke at the neighborhood pool, she has met a kindred spirit. They both have fathers disconnected from the family by their affairs— in Frankie’s case, her father has started life with a new young wife, and has even had a new baby named Frances, which makes Frankie feel like she has been erased from his life. Zeke’s mother has retreated to this town to live with her mother, until she can figure out how she and Zeke can proceed. Being from Memphis, Zeke has been unmoored from a city more connected to the wider world, and looks to Frankie for some sense of connection.

While Frankie’s artistic outlet is writing, as she is endlessly working on a story about a Nancy Drew-like character who is secretly pursuing a life of crime, Zeke is a visual artist, working with pens and pencils to create illustrations. They bond over their creative pursuits when they decide to create a poster, Frankie writing the words, Zeke drawing the illustrations, which they will mass produce with a copier found in Frankie’s garage, an item stolen from the high school by her brothers. Frankie writes, “The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.” Like any young writer, Frankie feels the creation of these sentences is magical, and she falls in love with the sensation of creation, and her created object. Zeke illustrates this in a somewhat threatening, almost nightmarish way, all hints and suggestions. They spend the following weeks making copies and plastering the poster everywhere in this small town, like graffiti. Like any artistic creation, once it is turned loose in the world, it has a life of its own. They learn they cannot control it, and people take it to dark and dangerous places.

Witnessing people’s reactions is by turns frightening and exciting. Some teens make cheap imitations to post, many adults are threatened, assuming Satanic cults are trolling their town. Matters get out of hand, and tragedy ensues. Frankie and Zeke manage to keep their involvement secret, until Zeke freaks out, cannot handle it any longer, and is whisked back to Memphis by his mother.

Twenty years pass, Frankie has created a life for herself as a successful author, wife and parent. When contacted by a reporter who stumbled upon evidence of her involvement in what has come to be known as the Coalfield Panic of 1996, Frankie must find Zeke and determine how she can finally come out of hiding and end her secret. I won’t spoil the ending, which is not only believable, but very satisfying.

I can really relate to this novel, having grown up in the time before the Web and cell phones, and coming from a town removed from culture of any sort. The teen years felt like an endless time of isolation from the world, when yearning to know what was out there, and how to become a part of that world. I can remember well the feeling of not being a part of small town life, yearning for more, and feeling that you could never break free of the banality and tedium, a prison of prosaic boredom. Frankie and Zeke stand in for so many of us at that time of life, just tasting the first fruits of creativity, and daring to hope that life could be much more than the mindless trap we were caught in. Wilson brings his gentle humor to this wonderful novel. Highly recommended.