Offseason by Avigayl Sharp is a funny, surprising, and woozy exploration of the difficulties of connecting, and the generational impact of trauma. Our unnamed narrator is spending the fall and spring semesters teaching English literature at an all-girls boarding school on the eastern seaboard of the United States. It’s a temporary post, due to the mysterious absence of the regular teacher. We immediately understand that her relationship with the world is shaded by questionable impulses and obsessions, her lenses denying her the ability to focus clearly on things, either giving them no thought or too much. She has a particular obsession with men—male teachers especially—who have a sexual interest in children or teens, and several times she alludes, elliptically, to two separate experiences of her own which have clearly had a destabilising impact. It becomes apparent, through her narration, that her distorted sense of self predates these experiences by many years, but may also have increased her vulnerability to them. Her classroom sessions are darkly funny—her brisk and ineffective methods focus only on Dickens’ Bleak House, and she rhapsodises about a young, “hot” Stalin at every (imagined) opportunity—and reveal, heartbreakingly, both her distance from and similarity to the troubled teens she teaches. She seems, in fact, to begin every interaction with her arm in the wrong sleeve of it, struggling to reshape it into something she can use. Sharp does an exceptional job of allowing us to witness the narrator’s struggles with her mind and body, her thought processes rendered through unusual similes, rich visual cues, and abrupt tonal shifts. There are many threads here, some informing each other, some expanding or contracting without resolving, but all of them deepening our understanding of our narrator and her off-kilter sense of the world. As often as she misreads a situation, she skewers another with a fresh perspective worth celebrating. It’s a remarkably effective portrayal of character, and makes for a truly invigorating read.