Life, love, and memory creates an engaging read in Maggie Pouncey’s debut novel, Perfect Reader. As Pouncey threads themes of possession, lost childhood and the past, she illustrates one’s yearning for lost experiences. Thus, the novel develops into an enlightening and transformative journey for the reader.

Perfect Reader is set in the bustling college town of Darwin whose liberal and local interests are charming and humorous. We quickly learn that tragedy brings strong willed Flora Dempsey into the fray of her childhood beginnings. Flora grapples with the death of her father, a preeminent literary critic and former college president. Though he has left an indelible mark on Darwin, Flora is an outsider at first glance. She inherits her father’s sprawling home, lovely garden and extensive book collection; but it is her father’s unpublished poems that leave footprints into an unknown past.

Pouncey weaves stories of past and present simultaneously to create a more compelling and complete narrative. We watch young Flora grow up and flourish in the president’s mansion. During her blissful days of childhood, she is privy to games, mischief, and new experiences. But happier times are quickly mired in her parents divorce: Forced to live with her mother, Flora loses that special connection with her father and struggles with feelings of estrangement: “It was not unlike the feeling she’d had growing up, post-divorce…the fear that she would somehow make things worse” (pg. 193). Throughout the novel, Flora retraces old memories of her family followed by a long absence. It is her father’s death that ultimately brings her back full circle to a place of lost memories.

In reading into her father’s life, Flora discovers he had a romantic relationship with another woman. Flora unearths the details of his muse in his unpublished poetry: “Cynthia was the Eve of Darwin’s Garden…she was open and honest, boldly aware of her own nakedness” (pg. 120). Reading about her father’s affairs created scandal and shame but facing her father’s secrets, illuminated the bias and flaws in her own life. She slowly evolves into the reader her father conceived for her: “Every silent revelation, every moment of recognition that takes place on the page between reader and writer is a renewal and a rebirth” (pg. 160). Flora begins to mend bridges with those in her father’s life reconciling the past with the present.

Pouncey mixes the ingredients of a college town as a familiar backdrop for the audience. Each section is patterned in the yearlong academic calendar: fall, winter, and spring. She juxtaposes hours of learning and reading, with a love of discovery and growth. Poetry and philosophical insights are interspersed throughout. A winning attribute in Pouncey’s novel is Flora Dempsey as each passage reveals a layer of her brash, blunt, and humorous nature: “She had stopped aiming for sense, or appropriate behavior. She was inappropriate for every occasion, like her shoes” (pg. 91). In another passage, she notes, “she felt like a gangly flamingo, the subject of a nature documentary” (pg. 83). Thus, her social awkwardness, flaws, and uncertainties create an engaging and authentic character.

Perfect Reader demonstrates the power of reconciling one’s past with the present. We recognize the flaws and challenges of decoding one’s relationships and experiences. Ultimately, Perfect Reader gravitates to the reader in all of us.