UNPRECEDENTED TIMES is the Ultimate Gen Z Pandemic Novel

Malavika Kannan's novel "Unprecedented Times" follows Rishi, a queer Indian American woman of Generation Z from Florida, who arrives at Stanford looking for different people, different ideas and a different version of herself. Evander James Reyes writes in Electric Literature that she expects college to transform her on schedule. About a hundred pages in, COVID interrupts the semester, the campus empties and the familiar shape of the campus novel falls away. Rishi and her friends have come of age online, where the world's crises arrive in real time together with a language about racism, feminism, sexuality, climate change and social justice. Reyes says Kannan takes pleasure in testing those ideas against the messiness of actual life, as the friends try to live by their ideals and with one another. In the interview, Kannan says she is a huge fan of the campus novel and wanted to write in that tradition while raising the stakes for a generation whose college years were shaped by the pandemic. She describes the book as a character study of self-obsessed, righteous young queer people for whom college is a time to live out their values, at elite schools that are also meant to be a pipeline into an elite class. Photo: King of Hearts, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.