Dana Czapnik Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Dana Czapnik is an award-winning American author that writes fiction inspired by her life and her interests.

Czapnik’s stories are set in the real world. They feature realistic protagonists struggling with realistic obstacles. The author came to fame in 2019 when her first novel, “The Falconer’, was published.

Before that, Czapnik worked in the arena of sports. A native of New York, Czapnik knew early on that she wanted to pursue a career in publishing.

She eventually attended Hunter College from where she earned her MFA and received a Hertog Fellowship.

This was on top of being awarded an ‘Emerging Writers Fellowship’ accolade from the Center of Fiction in 2017.

Czapnik spent several years operating on the editorial side of professional sports. She worked for the ESPN Magazine and the United States Tennis Association.

She also did some work for the Arena Football League before Atria Books, a Simon & Schuster Imprint, published her debut novel. Dana Czapnik’s writing has been described as vibrant.

The author has a husband and a son.

+The Falconer
Lucy Adler is a seventeen-Year-Old girl living in New York in 1993. Few other girls look or act like Lucy.

Her street smarts and brash talk always push her to the forefront. She is also quite passionate about basketball. And more often than not, you will find her making waves on public courts, the only girl in the game.

But like most teenagers, Lucy doesn’t know where she belongs. Basketball is merely one aspect of her life, the only aspect that makes any sense to her.

Over the years, she has grown cynical and insecure. She has a boy she loves. But Percy, her partner on the court and the son of a prominent clan, doesn’t seem to notice her affections, too caught up in his own efforts to resist the allure of his family’s sophisticated lifestyle.

As Lucy struggles to maneuver the heartaches of young romance, she is also drawn into a world she never knew existed by a pair of provocative female artists; a world that is free of the burdens of conventional success and the chains of male approval but which also harbors a dark side.

The Falconer is Dana Czapnik’s first novel and it shows. Even those critics that praised the novel for its story admitted that the author still had a few kinks that she needed to work out.

The Falconer tells a coming-of-age story, or so Dana Czapnik claims. Set in the early 1990s, Czapnik takes readers into the perspective of her young female protagonist.

A student of Upper West Side High School, Lucy is a great athlete, and nothing brings more excitement to her life like basketball.

When she isn’t playing for her high school girls’ team, she can be found in Riverside Park playing pickup games.

Being the only female presence on the public court never stops Lucy from dominating. And she has a great foil in Percy Abney, her wealthy friend for whom she harbors strong feelings.

The Falconer spends a lot of time following Lucy around, first at her school, then on the court in Riverside Park, and then when she goes off the beaten path with Violet and Max, the female artists who share an apartment in SoHo.

Lucy’s life is shaped by the observations she makes as she walks through the streets of New York and the many interactions she has with Max and Violet.

The novel has been criticized for not having a particular plot. The Falconer is supposed to be a coming-of-age story about a young girl trying to determine what her place in the world should be.

However, Lucy is already quite mature when readers first meet her, and the same thing can be said for her best friend and teammate, Alexis Feliz.

These girls might be young in age but they speak like grown women, so much so that they do not really have much in the way of room to grow.

It has been suggested that this is a failing on the part of the author; that Czapnik simply made a mistake in giving her protagonists such adult voices.

Ultimately, regardless of one’s opinion of Lucy’s maturity, The Falconer doesn’t have a definite plot that it explores.

Many of the chapters are spent following Lucy around as she muses about life and her friends and the things she encounters in New York.

This fact did not stop Dana Czapnik’s fans from devouring her debut novel fervently. For the most part, The Falconer was positively received.

The author’s audience loved the strength and independence of her heroine. They appreciated the fact that Lucy was determined to break free of the limitations that kept so many women in the 1990s bound.

They could also relate to Lucy’s struggle to determine her personal identity. And they could not wait to devour Czapnik’s follow up work.

There is no simple way to categorize The Falconer. Some people have called it Chick-lit because it focuses so strongly on the female mindset.

Others believe that the romance aspects firmly place The Falconer in the YA genre. But the romance is only a small part of the story, though the author definitely dips her toes into some of those more common YA tropes.

So much of this novel is spent in introspection. Czapnik spends several paragraphs and chapters presenting Lucy’s unfiltered stream of consciousness. You will find readers who believe that the author actually goes a little too far in this area; that she provides too many vivid descriptions of New York.

You will also find readers who believe that far too much time is spent delving into the minutiae of Lucy’s basketball games. There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that Dana Czapnik loves sports.

The light she shines upon her heroine’s attitude to the games she loves proves as much.

One’s ability to appreciate The Falconer will ultimately depend on their ability to accept and appreciate Lucy.

The readers who have admitted to enjoying Czapnik’s lengthy descriptions of New York and the Basketball games have also admitted to loving Lucy.

On the other hand, people who don’t care for Lucy have no patience for the detailed descriptions of her life and her world.