ACQUIRING TASTE

'I like it all. I like being moved"—this is 22-year-old Tess when she leaves her stifling hometown for the pull of magnetic New York City, alone and restless, in Stephanie Danler's debut novel, Sweetbitter (Knopf). Tess gets a job at a restaurant resembling the Union Square Cafe, a white-tablecloth bastion of aged glamour, and dives headfirst into the on-duty life of refined palates and sweaty concentration, and the hazy after-hours world of cocaine-hungry restaurant staff. Finding herself wedged between a bartender she falls hard for and a protective older waitress, Tess glimpses belonging before confronting loss head-on, and resolves to move forward. Danler's story is an unflinching account of what it's like to come into oneself in a city that offers her protagonist the tantalizing chance to remake herself infinitely, and of what it takes for her to realize that "being remade was the same thing as being constantly undone."

JULIA VITALE