In this collection, bestsellers, award winners, and emerging voices lead
us through the murky, overblown, hungry mind-set of youth. From parental
dysfunction to new sexual experiences to dealing with illness and death,
the coming-of-age story has never been so newly and complicatedly
rendered.
Our childhood fears are on full display in this collection. Imaginary
characters come to life, something evil lurks in the night, bullies
taunt us, parents stand in our way, and ghosts from the past haunt our
adult lives. Accurate, raw, and moving, these stories show children
teetering on the cusp of messy adulthood, and we see our own early days
and desires. In the opening story, a young man's vision of Roy
Rogers--his abusive, ailing father's childhood hero--leads him through
his family's tough past. Clark Blaise's eerily rendered Cold War America
comes next, where a teenage boy faces an enemy much closer to home.
Miranda Beverly-Whittemore takes us further into the darkness with an
entrancing, uncomfortable story that shows a teenage girl committing a
desperate act. And in Dana Kletter's "Night Song," a mother and daughter
become entwined with the same drug-addled trumpet player. The collection
ends with Katherine Vaz's surreal "Swan Sister," in which a girl
imagines away her baby sister's illness and death until the memory
begins to haunt her when she herself becomes a mother.
