Malavika Kannan stands on the shoulders of The Idiot, Luster, the works of Sally Rooney and Honor Levy, asking: Which comes first: experience or narrative?
UNPRECEDENTED TIMES
by Malavika Kannan
Holt/Macmillan, Fall 2026
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary)
Our story begins as a love letter to the distinct, batshit, yet canonical experience of the Queer Homoerotic Friendship. We enter the coming-of-age story of Rishi, an Indian-American girl from Orlando who beaches herself on the shores of Stanford “for the plot.” She sees nothing ahead of her except freedom, experience and love, and begins her journey with her sexuality and queerness as fast as humanly possible. Her roommate Georgia, a wealthy white girl from Maine and the daughter of two scientists, quickly becomes her best friend and confidant in all things. But the friends and love affairs that fill Rishi’s days (and the recaps she gives Georgia every night) and make her believe she is truly becoming herself begin to unravel with the abrupt onset of Covid. (I haven’t yet seen a Gen Z voice that talks about this period and the intense loss of possibility, just when they had reached the thing that had worked so hard for: college!).
Rishi and Georgia and their friends endure going back to the homes they had just left, but soon strike out on a new adventure: the Covid Gap year, where they join a farm collective and grapple with political radicalization and growing disillusionment…along with sexual tension and responsibility. Things start to get interesting with Georgia: she and Rishi get drunk and make out. Rishi thinks that she and Georgia have « gotten past » the kiss — she rationalizes it to herself that it is very normal for best friends to kiss, and if they are meant to be in love, they will figure it out much later. Georgia thinks otherwise.
Rishi has been focused on herself as the main character of her story, one rooted in her feminist and queer sensibilities of progress and agency, but by the end of the novel she faces painful experiences that shatter her sense of narrative, so all she can really do is feel her way through it, and trust that she will understand it later. Along for the ride, we may see the mistakes Rishi is making, but we learn something about ourselves and the world around us alongside her.
Malavika Kannan is a writer and organizer from Florida. According to men online she is « lazy, dumb, and loose, » but she prefers to identify as an advocate for queer women of color, online and IRL. She’s been featured by Seventeen Magazine, Good Morning America, and elsewhere, and graduated from Stanford University this year. Her YA novel, All the Yellow Suns was published by Little & Brown in 2023. She’s also written about Gen Z and culture for San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, Teen Vogue, and elsewhere. She draws viral cartoons and posts about queer identity for an audience of 40,000 across Instagram and TikTok. Her villain origin story is that, as a teenager in Florida, she organized with March for Our Lives and the Women’s March, and is forever committed to centering queer youth in movements for justice and joy.
