Orphaned young and raised by relatives with questionable connections to organized crime, Dani Capello has developed a tomboyish rebellious streak. When her misbehavior causes an embarrassing public scene, though, she’s summarily enrolled in a prestigious Catholic boarding school hours away from home. Skeptical at first, Dani falls in with a group of seniors and begins to form her own authentic identity – away from her family, home community, and trauma.

M.S. Izbicki’s DANI CAPELLO: Shadows of Men has to walk a few tightropes simultaneously. YA fiction about boarding school is its own subgenre with specific conventions and expectations, but a generic plot can become too formulaic to hold the reader’s attention. Fiction about Gen Z needs to engage with a diverse and protean vocabulary, but accurately representing the speech of 21st-century youth is an immense technical challenge whose end product would likely alienate some readers. LGBTQ fiction needs to confront real danger – it is still, oftentimes, fatal to be queer, even in the United States – but rehearsing a litany of traumas feels exhausting. Impressively, particularly for a debut novel, DANI CAPELLO doesn’t falter. Though there are areas where the balance might have profitably shifted (these teens owe far more to cultural depictions of early-2000s youth than to Gen Z; social media is almost never discussed, everyone smokes cigarettes and nobody vapes), the text manages to keep its focus on the emotional labor of building and maintaining intimate social relationships, rather than playing to its constituent parts (there is no overly-serious complex of boarding-school cliques and rivalries; its queer issues are framed purely within one central character and their closest relationships).

Izbicki manages this balancing act by successfully interlacing a relatively straightforward teen boarding school plot with an endearing queer love story, punctuated by moments of intense fear when men intrude upon the central characters. By the latter stages of the novel, it does feel like DANI CAPELLO is just playing the hits of high-school drama story beats, but those story beats are refreshingly handled (there is an abortion episode, for instance, but the drama is in withholding and ultimately revealing the fact, not any qualms or hand-wringing about the choice itself). Though the budding romance between Dani and her first girlfriend similarly holds few surprises (the need for secrecy, communication breakdowns, saying “I love you” first), the smaller moments are deeply affecting; especially for a queer reader, it’s hard not to be moved as the protagonists finally feel safe to hold hands in public.

With successful plotting and crisp prose, DANI CAPELLO has only one notable failing: a mafia subplot with an unclear connection to the central story. Dani’s family is obviously but ambiguously tied to organized crime, and in several instances criminal activity or violence enters the story, but there’s no evident thematic relationship to Dani’s life and relationships at school. There are clear parallels that could have been profitably explored (the need for secrecy, the pressures of public dissimulation, toxic gender roles, etc.); instead, crooks and thugs serve as a kind of “deus ex mafia,” mere plot contrivances where accidents or simple luck would be just as effective. Nonetheless, this doesn’t meaningfully detract from a thoughtful, entertaining, and moving debut novel.

Though a few thematic threads are left hanging, M.S. Izbicki’S DANI CAPELLO: Shadows of Men both impresses and satisfies with a confident narrative voice, comforting plot structures, and heartfelt affection for the queer youth who still struggle to live authentically and happily in modern America.

~Dan Accardi for IndieReader