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AND THEN I MET ELVIS...

An immersive, nostalgic, and sometimes-gloomy look at adolescence.

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In Bari’s debut coming-of-age tale, a teenage boy has many new experiences during the summer of 1969.

Thirteen-year-old Tim isn’t happy about relocating again. Because his alcoholic mother hasn’t been paying the rent, they have to move—in the middle of the night—to a trailer park in Glen Cove, Maine. Only two weeks remain in the academic year, but it’s enough time for Tim to catch the attention of Moosie and his fellow bullies at his new school. They mock him for being poor, beat him up, and promise they’ll see him at school next year. At home, Tim’s mother largely neglects him but also explicitly blames him for his father’s abandoning the family. However, the summer does have its perks. Tim begins regularly babysitting the 1-year-old son of his 21-year-old neighbor, Dorothy; the teen is almost immediately smitten with the young woman. Another recent arrival in the trailer park is Darrell, a teen who reminds Tim of Elvis Presley, resulting in a new nickname. The two boys frequently hang out at Dorothy’s or the local pizza joint. Over the summer, Tim dabbles in a variety of new activities, including smoking, drinking, shoplifting issues of Playboy, and listening to rock music; he repeatedly plays the Beatles’ single “The Ballad of John and Yoko” on the pizza place’s jukebox, as his mother bans it from their home for its lyrics’ presumed blasphemy. Once school starts, Moosie and his cronies reset their sights on Tim, but now the teen has the imposing and protective “Elvis” to back him up. However, not all the events of 1969 are good ones—as when Moosie takes full advantage of the few instances when Elvis isn’t by Tim’s side. Bari’s novel offers an absorbing but often dour story. The scenes inside Tim’s mobile home are bleak—the protagonist has to clean up his mother’s vomit—and those at school are incessantly tense, because Moosie is often waiting to strike whenever Tim is vulnerable. But a strong sense of nostalgia helps alleviate the book’s darker moments, as when Tim, as a paperboy, goes door-to-door to collect money from subscribers, some of whom actively avoid paying him. The boy also listens to copious rock tracks that were popular in 1969, although he’s primarily fixated on those by the Beatles. At another point, he and Elvis watch Easy Rider on the big screen, and when Tim emulates the movie by sewing an American flag on the back of his shirt, he inadvertently inspires anger. The author engagingly injects grim humor into the proceedings with occasionally cheeky descriptions, as when Tim describes his mother’s “high-heeled wobble down the hall to the bathroom.” There are a couple of plot turns in the latter half that are truly startling, but Tim’s overall character arc is consistent: He may be skinny, and the target of bullies, but he slowly becomes a stronger person—even if he can’t see it, himself.

An immersive, nostalgic, and sometimes-gloomy look at adolescence.

Pub Date: May 28, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-985693-45-6

Page Count: 256

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2019

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

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A LITTLE LIFE

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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