The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian

 A tear in the putting net, a line drive with a golf ball, the name “Kenny” called out, and a teen responding to his name combine to result in the death of the young man in The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian which became available August 4, 2026.

Mira Winston already lived life on the edge what with experimenting with booze, drugs, and sex with older men since she was 15 years old. Warning: this tale is told with a side of raunch! As a rebellious yet reliable narrator—she says so!—Mira tells the story of the day she killed Kenny

While her action that day resulting in the death of Kenny Foster is truly a freak accident, Mira believes that by killing him, she is deserving of the downward spiral that actually began before she ever swung her club that fateful day.

On August 3, 1978, in Talmadge, a tony suburb of New York City, temperatures are in the 90s when the 18-year-old golf prodigy shot her practice ball with a wooden club into the net while she awaited her time to tee off. First thinking the ball hit but not killed Kenny, Mira’s first reaction was to laugh at the pratfall. When she realized what had really happened, she abandoned her golf clubs, never to play again.

Not only does she give up the sport in which she excelled, but also she defers her entry to Yale and moves away from Talmadge where everyone knows she killed the caddy but also broke up another family through her affair with the much older husband.

Worse, the broken net leads to both criminal and civil liability with fingers pointing to Mira as the one who purposely caused the net to fail that fateful day by altering the net. The incident becomes a courtroom drama that is dramatically brought to a climax by a confession from one sitting in the courtroom audience that day.

Easily read in one session because of the driving force of the narrative, this novel packs a lot as it covers Mira’s life up to the point where she is writing a memoir given that she is a novelist who has written 26 books and several plays, a nod to author Bohjalian who has done exactly that. As a reader, this reviewer is amazed at how well a male writer captures the angst of a rebellious teenage girl.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting August 16, 2026.

I would like to thank Doubleday Books and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.