It’s 1956 in Queens, New York. Paula Levy is only 14, but she already knows that she’ll never forget hearing her first rock ‘n’ roll song. As she puts it:

“It was like waking up when I didn’t know I’d been asleep. The drums pounded, and the melody kept going around and around. My body moved by itself. I felt as if I were lost in a world I’d never been in before but might have been born in and never wanted to leave — like all my life until that moment I had been inside a little cage, and the door just swung open.”

An honor student who skipped a grade, Paula is used to being a loner, so it’s no surprise to her when neither her parents nor her neighbor/classmate Margaret have any use for this new kind of music. They don’t understand her love of Holden Caulfield and The Catcher in the Rye, either.

Paula is resigned to never connecting over her passions with anyone when she meets a cool girl named Barbara at the record store. It makes sense that Paula might bump into a fellow rock fan there, but she’s shocked when she recognizes a familiar book poking out of Barbara’s coat:

“And even though the book was squished and only half sticking out of her pocket, I knew what book it was from the gold-and-red cover. Catcher in the Rye. All beat-up, it looked exactly like my copy. Like the copy I always kept with me in my book bag because everyone thought it was a dirty book. My mother would’ve had a heart attack if she knew I’d read it even once, let alone four times.”

While Paula strives to be seen as more than a “creep” by the popular kids at school, Barbara can’t risk discussing anything as intellectual as a novel without jeopardizing her own reputation among those same kids. Obviously, the two can’t tell anyone about their friendship. But that doesn’t damage their bond — especially once Barbara introduces Paula to Elvis Presley and sets off a chain of events that will change both girls’ lives forever.

“Up until a few months ago, my life was so boring I thought nobody could have a worse life,” Paula observes. “Well now I knew that having problems is worse than being bored. I had so many problems, I didn’t have a second free for boredom.”

As author Enid Langbert unspools Paula’s story in All Shook Up, she makes good use of her chosen era’s distinctiveness. It’s barely a decade since the end of World War II, and Paula’s father is an immigrant who left Germany after losing his family in the Holocaust — a tragedy not yet distant enough to be taught in history classes or even named. In fact, it’s hardly discussed in Paula’s home because her father wishes the “past to stay in the past.”

With a meandering plot that features failed acts of youthful rebellion, misunderstandings, and an eventual reconciliation, All Shook Up echoes Paula’s favorite J.D. Salinger novel. As does Holden Caulfield, Paula comes to understand that, sometimes, all a body can do is persevere. “After the book ended,” she thinks, “he just went home and grew up. And so would we.”

Full of voice-y prose reminiscent of Louise Rennison’s Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging, Langbert’s debut perfectly captures the melodramatic narcissism that makes so many of the universal struggles of adolescence feel painfully unique. Its soundtrack isn’t bad, either.

Emma Carbone is a librarian and reviewer. She has been blogging about books since 2007.