Astrid Sees All

 By Natalie Standiford

Atria Books     2021

272 pages     Literary

Most young adults want excitement in their lives and the home town is not the place to get that excitement. It is no different for Phoebe, a young college graduate from Baltimore in the insightful novel, Astrid Sees All. Phoebe follows her college friend, Carmen, to the crazy lower Manhattan scene of the early 1980s. She has been devasted by the death of her father, but she knows that she must find something new in her life. The two young women descend on the East Village and find themselves enmeshed in an underworld that is both exciting and frightening. Phoebe becomes the fortune teller at the “it” club in the neighborhood. She disappears into a character, Astrid the Star Girl, and tells fortunes using the ticket stubs from the movies she and Carmen have seen—a brilliant plot device, by the way.

These are young women searching for an identity in the midst of shadows of all sorts, past, present, and future. We understand Phoebe to a certain extent but many of the other characters remain very elusive, including Carmen. There are no easy answers to the dilemmas that face them and no bright future, despite the fact that they are young, full of ambition, and drive. On the other hand, as they walk into the situations that are determining their future, we mature readers are cautioning those characters to be careful, to take it easy, and to not make such stupid decisions.

Astrid Sees All serves us best as a look at the gritty side of New York in the 1980s. We touch base with celebrities and scoundrels, druggies, as well as others as fresh and innocent as Phoebe. There is a lot of grief in the novel, but the plot keeps moving and the reader keeps reading. As we watch Phoebe weathering everything that has come her way,  we root for her survival. One reviewer called the characters “damaged young dreamers”, and that is a very accurate assessment of the lives we are reading about.

The novel has resonance in part because Standiford is a person who lived that scene and describes it so vividly. The book moves along surprising well, filled as it is with yearning and insight. It’s pretty dark, but I was able to move through it quite rapidly and appreciated both the dark and light of the story. All of a sudden this morning, I recalled one character and why she was included—I had not figured it out before. She is an old woman living in the building where Phoebe and Carmen are living. Addled by dementia, she wanders around the building knocking on doors, asking “What time is it?” Phoebe is extremely annoyed by her, but I believe the old woman is the voice of reason, calling on Phoebe and the others: “What time is it?” Time to get your shit together!                                                                            

 All of my children lived in New York City in their young adult lives, with varying degrees of success and satisfaction. My oldest son and his wife left the city and moved closer to home before the arrival of their first child. The other two left when the city tanked following 9/11. I very much appreciated the crises that enveloped Phoebe and the other characters, including her mother’s anxieties, because my children suffered from some of the same discomforting situations, and I was frequently anxious for them.  On the other hand,  I missed the city’s charms when my children moved to more familiar territory and I had no reason to visit the city.

Astrid Sees All is on everyone’s radar right now. Standiford was interviewed via Zoom for our local library this week, and there are also many reviews and interviews of the author to be found online. Here is a one minute sharing of the plot by the author. After thinking about it for a couple of days, my opinion is that the book is extremely readable but surprisingly flawed.

Natalie Standiford has written several children’s and young adult novels. Astrid Sees All is her first adult novel. Here is her website.