I NEVER LOVED YOUR MIND

by Paul Zindel ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1970

Our hero Dewey Daniels--his mother's a librarian but that's not the only miening--is wont to shunt the 'crass or mundane' into a footnote.* He's Penrod Graduated, or a Playboy cover-up for romantic dreams--to be shattered by the casual casuistries of one Yvette Goethals, toilet-paper thief (from the hospital where they're working), vegetarian (""Because I'm not a killer""), mere of The Electric Lovin' Stallions. . . and Now-and-then to be bedded. ""Our love was a burp?"" Dewey protests upon seeing his conquest destroyed, fouled out you might say--this after pursuing Yvette to what might be the ultimate petulant Love-In. It's a howl--of anguish too, and so is Dewey's befriendship with expiring Irene Schwartzkopf in Room 400, a sunken skull with a bow in her hair and a shoe box full of rejection slips for her poems. Irene dies, Yvette lights out with a piece of expensive equipment and the withering ""I never loved your mind""; ""Forgive us,"" says one of the Stallions, and that crowning irony doubles back--to Yvette atop the Bayonne Bridge fingering corruption in her old neighborhood house by house. Dewey? he'll quit the hospital, shun Love Land but not 'civilization'. . . ""because I might need an appendectomy sometime."" What's not downbeat is not upbeat either, just life enlarged in a novel--""I know it's a book and you know it's a book""--that has everything the late lamentable Hamburger lacked. By which is not meant sex (nudity doesn't qualify though Yvette's devastates Dewey) but freshness, fullness, direction. *This is less a juvenile than the sort of adult story of adolescence (unselfconscious obscenity, a curtained act) you's YA without a qualm.

Pub Date: June 1, 1970

ISBN: 1935169351

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1970

Categories: FICTION