The city never sleeps tonight, as Jess's ex-husband once said. I know the home, every corridor and room, all the angles, I used to spend time in it. A novel about a guy written by a girl, set (nominally) in my hometown and ten minutes from where I grew up though the only references to its setting are either a system of elimination or casual inference from the term U.S. Government or, once, a line about how the city is full of diplomats. It's present tense and modeled heavily off Rabbit, Run though its nice moments are something different. Those fun, warm, cool things are realistic depictions of fear or love or paranoia and a sorta sunken feeling, like sand drifts inside a home, where Beattie finds her own idea of art. People always show up on the telephone. As is always the problem when it gets to sex (amateur) or love of women (general until the end) or essentially whenever it gets close to male and never female experiences it feels like it was written by a girl. But I don't care. It's so nice to see my hometown — upper NW DC — and also kinda cool to place Woodrow Wilson (now Jackson-Reed) High School's history between this book and Minor Threat, to think about when the guys (Charles and Sam) went to high school - and or when I did.