“I know it’s dorky,” Alma says somberly, gesturing to the TV, “but I really, really love it.” Julia recognizes it, that edge-of-adulthood progression: tightly wound and hyperconscious teenage preferences—dictated for centuries, inevitably, by a tasteless few—giving way to the awareness that you’re allowed to like some of the things that you’re not supposed to like, that doing so may distinguish you, and that someone else might also like the forbidden thing, or simply witness you liking it and love you for it. Her daughter is piecing together her own interior rule book; this seems as marvelous
...more
