Archive for the ‘Coming-of-Age’ Category

A FAIR MAIDEN by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is one of the greatest and most prolific writers working today. She is the winner of the National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and more awards than can be fit into this short review. Her recent short novel, A FAIR MAIDEN, is one of her more minor works. Though I call it minor, it is by Joyce Carol Oates and, by any standard, that makes it major.

January 13, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags:  Â· Posted in: Class - Race - Gender, Coming-of-Age, Mystery/Suspense, Noir, y Award Winning Author

JUST KIDS by Patti Smith

There are a handful of writers who haunt me. That is, as I’m reading their books they come to me in my dreams, usually with sharp elbows and voices clamoring for attention. Cormac McCarthy effects me this way. So does, not surprisingly perhaps, Friedrich Nietzsche. No writers whisper to me in my dreams. It was the second night of reading Just Kids that I discovered here too a voice so strong and compelling so as to ring in my ears after the book is closed, the eyes shut and the brain turned off. Like caffeine, if consumed after a certain late hour, you know you’re in for a ride. Patti Smith is an original. She is a poet with the heart of a rock star and the drive of an Olympic athlete. She comes at you hard and fast and won’t let go, even in a dream state. She is that mesmerizingly good.

January 3, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  Â· Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Coming-of-Age, National Book Award Winner, New York City, Non-fiction, y Award Winning Author

NATION by Terry Pratchett

In interviews, Terry Pratchett has said that he had to write NATION. He pushed aside earlier scheduled work to accomplish this. The momentum of this need translates itself into a headlong rush which the reader experiences quite shortly after picking up the volume… until the end.

December 19, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Coming-of-Age, Speculative (Beyond Reality), y Award Winning Author

FALL by Colin McAdam

I’d seen FALL described as a “literary whodunit,” and was looking forward to some good sleuthing. It’s not quite like that. Mystery is involved, but plot and intrigue are entirely secondary to the study of adolescent development.

The two main narrative voices are Noel and Julius, both students at St Edbury’s – a Canadian high school for the children of the wealthy. Julius’s narration is an unpunctuated stream of consciousness, immediate and sensory. He’s good-looking, not overly bright and (as the story progresses) increasingly shown to be good-natured.

December 13, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Canada, Coming-of-Age, Contemporary, Mystery/Suspense, Reading Guide, y Award Winning Author

THE LAST RIVER CHILD by Lori Ann Bloomfield

The setting is Walvern, a small village in rural Ontario, where everybody knows everybody else. Or they think they know them, for acquaintance can turn easily into gossip and suspicion. Peg Staynor, the heroine, becomes a victim of it, even as a child. For her curiously pale grey eyes and solitary manner play into local suspicions that she is a “river child,” the reincarnation of someone previously drowned, who will bring them bad luck. It is a barely credible device (and unfortunately not the only example of somewhat strained plotting), but it works well as a metaphor for a loneliness that gradually turns into independence and strength. For this is essentially a coming-of-age story with a sweet touch of romance, and Peg makes a heroine who is very easy to care about.

December 3, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: Canada, Coming-of-Age, Debut Novel, Facing History, Family Matters

SKIPPY DIES by Paul Murray

The Ireland that is the setting for Paul Murray’s delightful novel SKIPPY DIES, is not the one we have heard about recently in the news—crippled by debt and threatening to bring down the Euro. Instead, the novel is set in the not-so-distant past when the roaring Celtic Tiger was a prominent player on the world economic stage. SKIPPY DIES is set in an Ireland where the “past is considered dead weight—at best something to reel in tourists, at worst an embarrassment, an albatross, a raving, incontinent old relative that refuses to die.”

It is in this Ireland that the boys of Seabrook College, the primary characters in the novel, come of age. One of their frequent haunts away from school is Ed’s Doughnuts House, a franchise branch of an international food chain. And it is at Ed’s where, in the very first chapter of the book, Skippy dies.

November 23, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Posted in: 2010 Favorites, Coming-of-Age, Contemporary, Reading Guide, United Kingdom, World Lit