Inappropriation

Inappropriation unpacks and skewers our confused age in the guise of a winning and authentic coming-of-age story. Only read Lexi Freiman's assured and enormously enjoyable debut novel if you want to discover an incisive new voice full of dark, merciless wit. —Steve Toltz

Starting at a prestigious private Australian girls' school, fifteen-year-old Ziggy Klein is confronted with an alienating social hierarchy that hurls her into the arms of her grade's most radical feminists. Plagued by fantasies of offensive sexual stereotypes and a psychotherapist mother who thinks bum-pinching is fine if it comes from the heart chakra, Ziggy sets off on a journey of self-discovery that moves from the Sydney drag scene to the extremist underbelly of the internet to the coastal bohemia of a long-dissolved matriarchal cult.

As PC culture collides with her friends' morphing ideology and her parents' kinky sex life, Ziggy's understanding of gender, race, and class begins to warp. Ostracised at school, she seeks refuge in Donna Haraway's seminal feminist text, A Cyborg Manifesto, and discovers an indisputable alternative identity. Or so she thinks. A controversial Indian guru, a mean clique of blondes all called Cate, and her own Holocaust-surviving grandmother propel Ziggy through a series of misidentifications, culminating in a date-rape revenge plot so confused, it just might work.

'Lexi Freiman is a savage writer, hilarious and brilliant, and in Inappropriation, she has reframed the traditional coming-of-age story, tackling it with irreverence and acid wit. This is a daring book, thrillingly of our moment.' —Emma Cline, author of The Girls

Inappropriation's crackling, electric prose is an uncomfortable joyride. You'll laugh out loud and squirm and wince, but you sure won't put it down. This novel is an original treasure—sentence by sentence, there is just no book like it. —Alissa Nutting, author of Made for Love and Tampa

Inappropriation is sly and risky, but also sweet, a wickedly funny machine built to make us laugh and think. The comic novel has a bold new voice in Lexi Freiman, and she could not have come along at a better time. —Sam Lipsyte, author of The Fun Parts: Stories and The Ask

Inappropriation reads like a modern-day Gulliver's Travels, exploring the psyche of a generation searching for a better world in all the wrong places. Wry and funny and unabashedly provocative, Lexi Freiman is a gimlet-eyed satirist of the cultural morasses and political impasses of our times. —Alexandra Kleeman, author of Intimations