10th Grade
A Novel
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Jeremiah Reskin has big plans for tenth grade—he wants to make some friends and he wants to take a girl’s shirt off. It’s not going too well at first, but when he meets a group of semibohemian outcasts, things start to change. Soon he’s negotiating his way through group back rubs and trying to find the courage to make a move on Renee Shopmaker, the hottest girl in school. At the behest of his composition teacher, Jeremy’s also chronicling everything in his own novel—a disastrously ungrammatical but unflinching look at sophomore year.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Weisberg touches plenty of familiar bases in this pedestrian debut novel, a coming-of-age affair that tracks protagonist Jeremy Reskin's second year of high school in the vanilla New Jersey suburb of Hurst Falls. Jeremy is a bright, reasonably popular and athletic adolescent who plays soccer, gets decent grades and has an ordinary family life with two sisters, a penny-pinching but well-meaning lawyer father and housewife mom. The plot weaves around the arrival of a sexy new classmate, Renee Shopmaker, who quickly touches Jeremy's heart after she becomes his dialogue partner in Spanish class. But it takes the entire narrative for Jeremy even to consider the possibility of seriously dating Renee, something he muses about during their final conversation after each winds up with a different date at the prom. In between, Jeremy spends his time dealing with the semiromantic friendship of a serious, rather melodramatic girl named Gillian until their potential relationship peters out just before the prom. Weisberg captures the essence of adolescent stream-of-consciousness in Jeremy's narration, and he sensitively presents the usual array of coming-of-age scenes, including Jeremy's sexual initiation, a bonding trip to New York with his dad, his exploits with the soccer team and his first foray into the world of drugs and alcohol. But the absence of any romantic developments between Jeremy and Renee makes the ordinary scenes seem all the more bland; the result is a decent novel of character with little to distinguish it from the raft of genre fodder. Weisberg is a solid storyteller who knows his way around his characters, but he'll need some stronger plot lines to build on this debut novel.
