The Swing Time Soda Emporium

Carlson's real gift here is voice-through-dialogue — specifically Poppy Jablonsky's. From the moment she corrects a hallucinating Morty about his choice of funeral flowers ("Really, Throckmorton, a cactus?") the book's engine is her rhythm of profanity, tenderness, and command, all delivered without a wasted beat. "Don't swear, Throckmorton. Swear words don't become you" — repeated across decades of the timeline — becomes a genuine character tic, not a writer's trick, and it lands harder each time because we've watched her earn the contradiction of being foul-mouthed and prim about his foul mouth in the same breath.

The rooftop scene after Charley Joe Wiggins is where characterization and dialogue fuse best: Poppy's confession — "I just called you my boyfriend, didn't I?" — followed instantly by threat and retraction, gives us a fully dimensional sixth-grader working out her own feelings in real time, sentence by sentence. That's harder to pull off than the novel's occasional purple flourishes (the "wounded water buffalo" grief, the overworked funeral opening) suggest the author is capable of.

The book knows its limitations too — it announces itself in the preface as unpretentious, coming-of-age, unashamed of nostalgia and naughtiness, and it delivers precisely that. The prose reaches for melody it doesn't always hit, and structurally the ghost-frame device is more novelty than architecture. But when Poppy is talking, the pages have genuine ear. That's the thing worth awarding.