GO HOME AND TELL YOUR MOTHER

A boy's eye view of the world, his own and the adult as they contrast in truth and dishonesty, fact and half understood fantasy, trust and disbelief. With his older brother, Jared, 12 year old Gil's knowledge of the Ohio town of Preston is wide, unconsciously aware, and filled with information about its inhabitants that would shock his fulminating, undeviating father, Presbyterian minister, Bayard Iverson, and astound his book-writing Mother. His introduction to sex comes through his teacher, his hatred for his Father burns brightly and is fanned by his Grandfather's opposition to the minister's upbringing of his sons, his year is filled with ways in which to earn money, a tornado, his devotion to young Mary, the danger of his Father's championship of prohibition, the death of his mother and the new baby. Even the townfolk are called on to admonish his Father and demand better treatment for the Iverson children so that when they move to a new congregation in New Jersey the future looks happier for the family. Gil's innocence is backgrounded by an almost Spoon River anthologizing of the lives of the people of Preston, by a probing insight into the abnormal of a small town early in the century, by the world of childhood so terrifying in its logic, so vulnerable in its immature comprehension. For adults only.