Meet Stephen Florida: college student, amateur wrestler, visionary, outsider. Entering senior year, his sights are set on the championships. Every practice, every match, is a step closer to greatness, yet also a step further from reality. Profane, manic and tipping into the uncanny, this is Florida’s chronicle of loneliness, obsession, and the drive to leave a mark. With echoes of The Art of Fielding and the film Foxcatcher, Gabe Habash’s daring, revelatory debut journeys into the mind of a young man teetering between control and rage, grief and elation, genius and insanity.
An interesting debut novel from Gabe Habash about coming of age.

A distinctive voice and flawed but endearing narrator make this a compelling read, Intense and raw.

"My name is Stephen Florida and I'm going to win the Division IV NCAA Championship in the 133 weight class. That's it."
This is a weird book, and definitely won't be to everyone's taste. It is one of the strangest books I've ever read. Two pages of the novel are simply 97 names of the names of guys that have beat him in the all the years he's wrestled. Yes, nothing but names.
Equal parts upsetting, befuddling, and unnerving.
There are some pretty strange and clever quotes out of this book such as
"My mother had two placentas and I was living off both of them. I was supposed to have a twin. When the doctor yanked me out, he said, "There's a good chance this child will be quite strong." This is the story my parents told me, but I really never believed it."
and "Identity is curious and always getting misplaced, sometimes you have to hold it pretty hard to keep it from getting away. I was never once the most talented, not even close, but I always had my single-mindedness, foolish greedy dodo single-mindedness."
The book is written in the first person so you are hearing his thoughts and seeing his actions.
Through the voice of Stephen Florida the author lets us see and hear the warped mind of a very disturbed young man so focused on one thing that it begins to distort his reality and culminates his descent into depression and madness as he completes his final year of college and wrestling for a national championship.
The specifics of training and wrestling play a large part in this book, and not personally knowing what the wrestling moves or positions are produced large volumes of story whose meaning was lost on me.
The book is well written and i think even though it won't be everyones cup of tea but i think that it will fill a hole in a very niche market.