by Tom Spanbauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 2006
A nostalgic paean to young “warriors of love.”
A simmering Midwestern household boils over when a gay teenager discovers sex, drugs and rock-’n’-roll circa 1967.
On the family farm in Pocatello, Idaho, Rigby John Klusener obeys his repressed, work-weary parents like a good Catholic boy should, but it doesn’t seem to do much good. His dour father hardly acknowledges him. And his mother alternates between enjoying Rigby’s high spirits—he plays dress up with his older sister—and assuring him he’s going to hell. At school, life’s equally grim: Joe Scardino regularly beats him up, and the word “queer” is sneered in his direction long before he knows what it means. Once puberty hits, bringing chronic tumescence, life gets even harder: His mother spies him in a private moment of “self abuse” and transports Rigby at 80 miles an hour down the highway to confession. His father, a raging bigot, threatens Rigby with his belt if he befriends anyone outside their church. Into this bleakness arrives Billie Cody, a large-breasted sophomore with a gimlet eye for false piety. They smoke pot, listen to the car radio, kiss a little, but mostly they talk about literature, hypocrisy and the future. When Billie finds sexual fulfillment elsewhere and winds up pregnant, everyone assumes Rigby is the father. Prom night brings everything to flash point: Rigby’s mother stalks her defiant son with a broom handle; Billie’s drunken father wants Rigby’s hide; and Scardino needs to settle an old score with his former whipping boy. Only George Serano, a notorious local full of his Indian tribe’s spiritual wisdom and a brazen passion for other men, can help Rigby find his personal path out of town. Although some of his bullying characters—the father and Scardino especially—are mere personifications of evil, Spanbauer (The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon, 1991, etc.) writes this fairly traditional coming-of-age story with a raw energy that makes it compelling.
A nostalgic paean to young “warriors of love.”Pub Date: May 15, 2006
ISBN: 0-618-58421-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
Share your opinion of this book
More by Tom Spanbauer
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by J.D. Salinger
BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
Awards & Accolades
Likes
26
Our Verdict
GET IT
New York Times Bestseller
IndieBound Bestseller
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
Share your opinion of this book
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.