ALA Best Fiction for Young Adults * New York Public Library Books
for the Teen Age
A riveting, scorching--and hilarious--autobiography by the
award-winning author of Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes and Deadline.
From trying to impress a member of the girls' softball team (with
disastrous dental results) to enduring the humiliation of his high
school athletic club initiation (olives and oysters play unforgettable
roles), Chris Crutcher's memoir of the tricky road to adulthood is
candid, disarming, laugh-out-loud funny, relevant, and never less than
riveting.
He vividly describes a temper that was always waiting to trip him up
even as it sustained him through some of the most memorable mishaps any
child has survived. And how did this guy (he lifted his brother's
homework through the entire tenth grade) ever become a writer, not to
mention the author of fourteen critically acclaimed books for young
people?
The frontier may be mild, but the book is not. Fans of Tara Westover's
Educated, Jack Gantos's Hole in My Life, and Walter Dean Myers's
Bad Boy will laugh, will cry, and will remember.
"Funny, bittersweet and brutally honest. Readers will clasp this
hard-to-put-down book to their hearts even as they laugh
sympathetically."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)