Coming of age in a time of struggle
592771
Excellent, both in the history of the civil rights movement of the early 1960's and in the clear-eyed account of what it's like to be idealistic, passionate, bright, courageous, and very young. A coming of age in wartime novel, from a girl's point of view. I would recommend it to people who remember, and people who don't remember, the struggle for civil rights; people who are now, or have ever been, young.
2616765
Set in WWII era England and Canada, the sky is falling is a poignant coming of age story during one of the toughest times in history. The story is told through the eyes of Norah, a ten year old English girl who is growing up in her war pocked country. To her great dismay she and her younger brother are sent away to Canada to live with some elderly sister in order to keep them safe from the bombs that are dropping in England everyday. Her parents only want to keep her safe but Norah feels betrayed by her parents for sending her away, and feels extremly lonely in this new country where no matter how hard she tried could not manage to fit in. The book follows Norah through her struggle to be accepted in Canada and to come to terms with her own feelings about being sent away from her native country and the idea tha one can find home wherever they go. The Sky is Falling combines a wonderful coming of age story that would be interesting for any young adault, and a really vivd picture of what life was like for the people of Canada and England during WWII. This is a must for anyone who wants a great story and a little bit of history.
2033259
This is an amazing coming of age novel that also encompasses a young man straddling two cultures and triumphing.
4873674
A coming-of-age for two of the characters and a poignant story of growing old for another character, while they all learn about moving on. Catherine Ryan Hyde is a great storyteller, but this one sits very close to my heart. Redemption, adventure, alcoholism, absent parents, and love in its purest form, this story will drag you along in a wondrous world where opportunity nestles with circumstances.
2142259
CROSSING THE RUBICON is a coming of age story about a young boy growing to manhood in Apartheid South Africa. Painful at times, and written with depth and emotion, I was exposed to the hardships of prejudicial way of life that in its dying days. The novel spans several decades and culminates with Nelson Mandela when he retires as President.

There were plenty of good descriptions to make the setting come alive, heart-wrenching scenes, and a memorable main character. It gives a very good historical perspective of what it was like to live in South Africa before the abolishment of Apartheid.
2569661
This is an excellent and fascinating coming-of-age story,with some surprises. The setting in Nigeria, during a time of political unrest, adds richness to the story. In the early chapters, I dreaded reading further because I was afraid of what the father character would do, but my book club friends encouraged me to read to the end and I was so glad I did. It was a fast read.
1397837
Honest, searching memoir written in lyrical prose befitting the author's background as a poet. Albert leads us through the "long strange roads" he followed from New England to the San Francisco area. Much more than a story of addiction and recovery, this book explores a young man's coming of age in a turbulent era, discovering new frontiers and building a life rooted in spirituality and creativity. Recommended to anyone who loves other classic coming of age quests like SIDDHARTHA, THIS BOY'S LIFE or THE GOLDFINCH.
4485364
Young readers will certainly relate to Ebram's struggles and anxieties as the new kid in school. His coming of age story is wonderfully woven with themes of family values, cultural diversity, community involvement, and some interesting surprises along the way.
2064457
A good coming of age story.  I had a difficult time getting into it, but once I was invested, it moved at a good pace.  The culture and religious beliefs covered in this book are somewhat unknown to me, but I did learn some from it and it was explained well enough that it was not hard to follow.
1833160
So much going on and when trying to deal with it all, youth finds lack of experience brings difficulties nearly insurmountable.  Language a bit rough for the times.  The story does present the youth of the era and their dependency on more mature people they trust.
2680655
A young man comes of age and grows to maturity gaining insight to himself and the meaning of family. Having spent many years moving about due to his father's work,the father secures a high level position that returns the family to their native India. The shock of readjusting after so many years in America right as he starts college is a difficult challenge. It seems his life has been about the leaving of things with the leaving of his love interest, friends and what he thought would be his future in America prehaps more than he can bear. The societal and cultural constraints of India are not to his taste and he is quite unhappy. He grows to appreciate the family, friends, and culture of India. Written with beautifully descriptive language Vikram's India comes alive with sights, sounds, and tastes. When his family visits the Taj Mahal you feel as though you are there with him. Eventially he has to make a decision about what to do with his life, whether to stay or leave wiht the understanding of what that means.
1270271
With Cecily, Zulkey does an excellent job of capturing the awe, aimlessness, fears, and social anxiety of being a teenager. Even though she doesn't want to, Cecily can't help admiring her older siblings' lives, their independence, even as she's uncertain whether she will ever be able to fully take steps towards her own. She fights with her father, about nothing and everything, but knows she will miss him.

An Off Year is about feeling out of place, at college, and at home, and while that feeling isn't specific to being a teenager, there is a profound way that for teenagers, especially as they embark on being adults, it seems overwhelming. Cecily is discovering "the real world" and Zulkey doesn't paint it as all powerful or all demoralizing. Cecily has to learn for herself, along with some mentors, crushes, friends and former friends, what it means to be herself. Most of all, she has to learn to trust that she will find her path.

I'd recommend this to anyone in high school or college, especially, who feels out of place, a little lost. This is not an action-packed book racing from one wild scene to the next. It offers a slow reveal, an internal dialogue Cecily has with herself, which spares no one--her parents, her friends, her counselors. There are times when most readers will find Cecily's worldview a little harsh, a little bitter, and I had to rein myself in from judging her too harshly because she is, after all, a teenager and that is part and parcel of life for most teens. Scratch that surface of jadedness and Cecily is open to wonder, though sometimes it takes unexpected forms, like her brother's girlfriend Angie, who she tries to hate, but can't. Cecily is a keen observer of those around her, in part because she's afraid to really ask herself what she wants, though when she finally does, she starts to see that while she may be different from her peers, she's not all that different. Zulkey ends the book on a hopeful note, and has created a book that doesn't lionize college as "the best years of your life." I liked that Cecily didn't do something cliched during her year off, that she spent a lot of it "wasting" time that it turns out wasn't wasted at all. This book doesn't have a sappy ending, but it does have a happy one, though easily could have had a happy ending even if Cecily hadn't made the decision she does, which, I think, is part of the lesson of An Off Year; that we all have to find our own path, as winding and meandering as it may be, and that nobody can tell us exactly what that path will be.
4932623
A great coming of age story. The main character in this story is a young woman who is trying to cope with the tragic loss of her boyfriend, while trying to do her part in resisting the Nazis; to find a missing Jewish teenager. This novel is so moving because the main character used her emotions and understanding that she had in her relationship to find the missing girl.
3325252
Thirteen years in the making, FAMILY LIFE, the slender new novel by Akhil Sharma, author of AN OBEDIENT FATHER, is a potent, impressive portrait of an immigrant familys assimilation into their new life in America, and their struggles in coping with the aftermath of a sudden and horrible accident. Like other great novels from the tradition of the immigrant experience, its also a devastating look at prejudice, the clashing of cultures, and the ringing hollowness of the American Dream.

The story proper begins in Delhi, India. Mr. Mishra, a gloomy accountant, dreams of moving his family --- his wife and two young sons, Birju, and Ajay, the books narrator --- to an idealized America after the 1965 loosening of U.S. immigration laws. However, it isn't until the mid-1970s nightmare of Prime Minister Indira Gandhis Emergency, during which she suspended the constitution and put thousands of people in jail, that Ajays father is finally compelled to apply for a visa. Though nobody else in his family shares his enthusiasm, he leaves and lands in Queens, where he sets himself up as a clerk at a government agency. He sends for his family a year later. But before they leave, Sharma shifts the focus back to the remaining family members last days in Delhi, capturing the simplicities of the Mishras meager existence, the intricacies of class relations in Indian culture, and a growing realization in Ajay of what they're all on the brink of losing in fluid, vivid, emotionally resonant prose --- a trait Sharma maintains throughout the book.

When they do arrive, Sharma movingly and humorously describes the astonishment the newcomers feel on landing in a place of such unimaginable largesse: wall-to-wall carpeting, hot water from a tap, almost non-stop television. Even the endless traffic lights impress. By comparison, as Ajay remarks on the lone traffic light in his old hometown, People were so unused to being directed by a light that a traffic guard stood underneath, repeating its directions with his hands.

Problems inevitably arise. While the gifted, socially adept Birju is primed and mercilessly coached by his aspiring parents for acceptance to the prestigious Bronx High School of Science, Ajay is being bullied at their predominantly white school, finding that most of the students look surprisingly the same to him, and that the school itself feels like an enormous, monotonous maze, one in which he frequently gets lost. Ajay eventually finds a kind of equilibrium, but when Birju gets accepted at Bronx Science, he only feels that much more alienated and alone.

Though this novel is, by Sharmas admission, largely autobiographical, its to his credit that he never milks a readers sympathy. Ajays youthful anguish feels genuine, but his --- and Sharmas --- even-keeled compassion for others keeps that pain in perspective. And when Birjus life is effectively cut short in an accident at a swimming pool, Sharmas grip on that compassion not only doesnt falter, it becomes in many ways the primary focus of the book. When Birjus condition comes to dominate life at home, Birjus parents, strapped for cash and falling apart emotionally, find themselves struggling to hold things together. And Ajay, already feeling overshadowed by Birju, is soon tormented by feelings of anger toward him, as well as unexpected, overwhelming feelings of love.

At a mere 224 pages, FAMILY LIFE is a miracle of compression. Sharma packs enough emotion, incident and stellar prose into its fine frame for several novels. And while the first half holds most of the books heat and momentum, whats generated by that intensity is enough to sustain the second half through its painful, excruciating unraveling to its quiet yet unsettled ending. FAMILY LIFE makes it clear that Sharma is a dazzling and gifted writer. One hopes it won't be another 13 years before his next book.

Reviewed by Damian Van Denburgh
3341648
A coming-of-age story that depicts both the hardships and the hopes of a Japanese young man (15 at the beginning) who has to spend several years in a Japanese-American war camp during World War 2. The poignant story will engross you from the very beginning. It reached out and grabbed my heart, and its rare that I find an author with the ability to craft that kind of story. I look forward to reading more from her.
4443187
This is really a coming of age novel about three high school students whose lives are deeply affected by a mysterious murder and suicide done by the father of one of them. One of those students, the narrator, is haunted by the event and seeks reasons for tragedy, along with many others in North Dakota. But this obsessive wish to understand the tragedy, if only to achieve closure, is less central to Mr. Watson's story than the impact it had on those high school students. These events largely play out in the joys and sorrows of young love. The boy whose father shot a politician and then hanged himself is permanently scarred by the tragedy, which stains everything he does thereafter, and especially his relationships with women. Larry Watson depicts these events powerfully, with heartrending tenderness as he follows the lives of his young protagonists into their middle years. Mr. Watson sensitively catches the early 60s milieu, thus framing his story in the moral and spiritual values of the those times. He is a major American novelist, one of the finest writing in these times. The sheer force and truth and honesty of his novel reaches the heart and soul of his readers.
1535811
A very good novel that explores the emotions, the scars and the questioning that arise when a loved one suddenly disappears overnight from a tight-knit group of friends and community in small town America. While maintaining a tight pacing on the plotline, the novel manages to delve into the emotions and self-examination that beset those left behind as they struggle to fill a hole in their life and meaning, and have their faith tested. Above all, though, this is a reminder, a poignant one, that we all have choices, that we often are free to make our own decisions, and that our decisions in large part make us who we are, for good or bad. That is the coming-of-age lesson Lillian learns, and one which we all should take to heart.