Fine Young People
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Narrated by:
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By:
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Anna Bruno
About this listen
A smart, contemporary campus novel—Prep meets I Have Some Questions for You—in which a high-school senior investigating the death of a star hockey player at her elite Jesuit school discovers the rot at the heart of the institution, as well as some surprising truths about her own past.
Frankie is a good daughter, a loyal best friend, and a model student, coasting through her final semester at an elite Catholic prep school in a wealthy Pittsburgh enclave. But acceptance to her dream college leaves her unmoored. When a classmate takes his life after posting a cryptic message about Woolf Whiting, a former student who died in a presumed suicide years earlier, she begins to question whether getting what she wants will ever be enough.
As the community mourns, a muffled conversation between Frankie's mom, who teaches history at the school, and the priest who teaches her philosophy class, captures her imagination. Soon, Frankie is drawn into an investigation of the life and death of Woolf, who had been a legendary star hockey player with the brightest of futures. Frankie speaks to Woolf's sister, Maddie, now a high-powered lawyer in New York; his former girlfriend, Susanna Mercer—who Woolf's mother is convinced knows more about Woolf's death than she has revealed; and his best friend, Vince McMahon, and as she does she discovers the rot at the heart of her supposedly elite education.
With a wry, up-the-patriarchy, wise-beyond-her-years narrator in Frankie and a thrilling plot, Fine Young People is a cold-case mystery with a Hitchcockian twist and a portrait of a young woman searching for meaning in a world that values achievement above all else—perfect for anyone who loves a campus novel with a decidedly contemporary voice.
©2025 Anna Bruno (P)2025 Algonquin BooksCritic Reviews
"Fine Young People is, unusually but in more than one sense, a mystery novel—not only about the mystery of a young man's death some twenty years in the narrator's past but about the mystery of the overlapping things, the eternal present, the mysteries of faith and grief and friendship. What might be most impressive about it is how much it manages to express without ever laboring for breath. It's eloquent, but casual about it; moving, but casual about it; funny, but casual about it; suffused with the deep unknown, but casual about it."—Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories
"Fine Young People is a Holy Trinity of a novel: the sacred ground of Saint Ignatius ensconced in Pittsburgh’s gritty beauty and industrial history, a captivating mystery that obsessed me at every turn, and complicated, unforgettable characters. Bruno excavates long-buried, multi-layered tragedy, unravels the tangled threads that tie Catholics to their faith, and interrogates the highs and harms of elite sports culture, navigating ambition, religion, family dysfunction, young love, and enduring friendships with the grace and fearlessness of a star athlete who knows all her plays by heart."—Katie Runde, author of The Shore