TIME AND PLACE

by Bryan Woolley ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 14, 1977

Woolley has locked in both time (1952) and place (that now-so-familiar dusty Texas town) convincingly, with another bittersweet monochrome about youth's end and the way it all was. A polio epidemic breaks up high school friendships, striking four in the town of Fort Appleby, and shrivels the boyhood dreams of Kevin Adams and his pal Jasper Birdsong into circumscribed realities. While the town fides out the fear, Anglos and Mexicans briefly united in grief, Kevin falls in love with Mexican Rosa. But Rosa's mother, like Kevin's widowed mother, is outraged at the match. To protect her daughter she offers her favors in exchange for Kevin's forgetting Rosa. But Kevin, throughout the coo-coo-ka-choo-ing of this heavy-thighed Mrs. Robinson, keeps a cool head and marries now-pregnant Rosa. And Jasper, crippled for life with polio, feels he has been strangely freed from bondage to the small-town life which Kevin is destined to embrace. Woolley takes a vital reconnaissance of bygone ambience and mores, and although some characters, particularly the women, are merely sketched in for function, this is an agreeable trip back home to those fevered pinnacles of adolescence scaled before time is known to have a stop.

Pub Date: June 14, 1977

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1977

Categories: FICTION