I'm a big believer in being pretty forgiving on someone's first novel. I've been there—I'd honestly give anything to undo some of my earliest work, no matter how kind other people have been about it.

That said, there's something about coming in with that forgiveness on lock, only for the book to go "Oh, no thank you" and absolutely knock your socks off.

Cows Can't Jump is, on its surface, the same as a lot of books that have come across my desk over the past handful of years. It's a coming-of-age book set against the backdrop of Brexit and the 2016 U.S. election. But, contrary to so many books along those lines, it really is against the backdrop. These things are happening, yes. Our protagonist, Bill, knows plenty of people with very strong opinions on both. But Bill is a teenager, and teenagers have much bigger, much more earth-shattering things on their minds than world events. Like a girl.

Though Bill's story plays out largely episodically, there is an arc. He starts off as a gravedigger, the butt of his coworkers' jokes. After leaving the job in disgust, he takes up a job at a summer school, where he meets Eva. He falls head over heels for her, but she's everything he's not: socially conscious, well read, adventurous. She's tied into the happenings of the world. And when the summer ends, she's going away.

That, plus a desire to get out of his family's home as everything is falling into ruin around his grandfather's impending wedding, leads to a wild series of events: starting with shooting racehorses and leading to a race against time to a church in Slovenia.