Zero O'Clock

July 15, 2021
Already reeling from loss, a Black high school senior brings her OCD, anxiety, and depression into March 2020. In the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, Gethsemane Montego is a musical-theater-loving, BTS-fangirling, 16-year-old senior at New Rochelle High School. She and her two best friends--Jewish Korean valedictorian Tovah and Cuban American star quarterback Diego--attend the same high school where Geth's security guard father died tragically three years ago during a shooting. Geth resents how quickly her mother has moved on--with a White man, at that--but, as best they can, her friends help her manage the increases in her anxiety and compulsions as well as her stifling grief. Awaiting admission results from Columbia is an added stressor, but as the coronavirus case numbers quickly shoot up, Geth faces multiple burdens and traumas. Police violence, racial inequity, hyperpartisanship, immigration, economic anxieties, and a complicated coming-out story all pile on top of the pandemic's hefty body count. Geth is a likable, smart Gen Z protagonist in this modern epistolary work that combines diary entries, text messages, news reports, emails, and English lit essays to immersive effect. Wringing so much content, so much hurt, into a YA novel is a tall order that yields very mixed results. Still, whether through cutting humor or disparate political perspectives, Farley offers readers undeniable value in this retelling of recent, unforgettable history. Commendable ambition that may help readers look forward. (Fiction. 14-adult)

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September 1, 2021
Grades 9-12 For 16-year-old Geth Montego (like the rest of us), the COVID-19 pandemic begins on March 11, 2020, with what was supposed to be a temporary lockdown. She calls it "zero o'clock," after a song by BTS, the K-pop group she loves and can talk about endlessly. The lockdown affects her relationships with her two best friends, Tovah and Diego, with whom she primarily socializes via text. Geth worries about her mother, a nurse; frets about Kevin, her mother's boyfriend; and observes and reflects on the world around her in what reads like a series of journal entries. She is bright and opinionated and tends toward self-absorption, until she ventures outside herself and toward the messiness and imperfection of participating in the real world, and when she begins to take action against racial injustice in her city, her expressiveness gains cohesion. Farley packs in plenty of cultural references and slang, and while these might go stale quickly, his brilliance is in getting into the mind of a 16-year-old Black girl and giving her a vivid voice.

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October 1, 2021

Gr 8 Up-Sixteen-year-old Geth Montego already had her world upended when her father died three years ago in a school shooting, and now it's happening again as COVID-19 takes over America. Geth loves Broadway and BTS, has two close friends, and is eagerly awaiting her college acceptance letters, but readers will be waiting to see how 2020 unfolds for the teen and her friends. A confrontation with the cops puts Geth in the center of the Black Lives Matter movement in her community, pushing her already fraught coming-of-age story into the limelight. Geth's voice carries the novel through our unprecedented recent history as she navigates grief, anger, and her own mental illnesses of anxiety, depression, and OCD during the stay-at-home orders and rising pandemic death toll. Her narration comes at the cost of some heavy exposition, which Farley breaks up epistolary-style with news reports, texts, emails, and even school essays. This novel juggles police violence, social justice, college stress, mental illness, friendship, romance, and the pandemic. A few of those topics get dropped before the finish line, but Geth's sense of humor helps smooth things over as they relive 2020 with her. Geth is Black, her best friends are Jewish Korean and Cuban American, and her mother's boyfriend is white. VERDICT While the novel doesn't deliver on all fronts, it could find a home with collections looking for quarantine fiction right now. An additional purchase.-Emmy Neal, Lake Forest Lib., IL

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