A skillful exploration of a tween boy’s coming-of-age.
During summer vacation, a boy faces difficult choices during a club initiation in Greene’s debut YA novel.
School is almost over, and narrator Wills and his best friend, Andrew Wyler, have plans for a new club called the Annelids, named after worms that Andrew finds interesting. The invitation list includes the boys’ closest friends, but inevitably, Wills’ older brother, Taylor, and Taylor’s friend Strat Sherwood find out about the club. They insist on being part of it, too, but they’re bullies who have a tendency to take things over. “Having Taylor involved in this club is not making my life any easier,” thinks Wills. At the first club meeting, Wills makes a suggestion for an initiation: “How about we dig a really deep tunnel and make like the worms do, join our powerful brothers underground?” Taylor and Strat seize on this idea, liking the thought of a bravery test to weed out the weak. The boys organize and carry out their plan, finding a good location in the pine woods, gathering tools and plywood, making scale drawings, and digging out stones and roots. During this process, Wills finds Andrew’s journal and discovers that his friend has severe asthma, but he keeps the secret, as his friend is already picked on enough. When the tunnel is complete, the initiation rites will test the boys’ courage and resourcefulness. Greene ably presents the contradictions and difficulties of growing up from a boy’s point of view. Wills and his friends are at an age when girls are still “others” and boys fear looking weak more than anything else in the world. Wills, however, is kind; noticing his mother’s laugh lines, he thinks, “It’s my mission to get her laughing as often as I can.” Still, pressure from the older, challenging boys gets to Wills; he has to admit that he’s been a jerk sometimes, that Andrew has reason not to trust him with the news of his diagnosis, and that maybe he’s become too much like his brother. The way that Wills navigates his competing instincts is realistic and moving.
A skillful exploration of a tween boy’s coming-of-age.Pub Date: May 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-945980-57-5
Page Count: 134
Publisher: North Country Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’...
Fresh version of one of the world’s oldest epic poems, a foundational text of Western literature.
Sing to me, O muse, of the—well, in the very opening line, the phrase Wilson (Classical Studies, Univ. of Pennsylvania) chooses is the rather bland “complicated man,” the adjective missing out on the deviousness implied in the Greek polytropos, which Robert Fagles translated as “of twists and turns.” Wilson has a few favorite words that the Greek doesn’t strictly support, one of them being “monstrous,” meaning something particularly heinous, and to have Telemachus “showing initiative” seems a little report-card–ish and entirely modern. Still, rose-fingered Dawn is there in all her glory, casting her brilliant light over the wine-dark sea, and Wilson has a lively understanding of the essential violence that underlies the complicated Odysseus’ great ruse to slaughter the suitors who for 10 years have been eating him out of palace and home and pitching woo to the lovely, blameless Penelope; son Telemachus shows that initiative, indeed, by stringing up a bevy of servant girls, “their heads all in a row / …strung up with the noose around their necks / to make their death an agony.” In an interesting aside in her admirably comprehensive introduction, which extends nearly 80 pages, Wilson observes that the hanging “allows young Telemachus to avoid being too close to these girls’ abused, sexualized bodies,” and while her reading sometimes tends to be overly psychologized, she also notes that the violence of Odysseus, by which those suitors “fell like flies,” mirrors that of some of the other ungracious hosts he encountered along his long voyage home to Ithaca.
More faithful to the original but less astonishing than Christopher Logue’s work and lacking some of the music of Fagles’ recent translations of Homer; still, a readable and worthy effort.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-08905-9
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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