Stay With Me
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
Céce and Mack never expected to fall in love. She’s an A-student; he’s a high school dropout.
But soon they’re spending all their time together, bonding over a rescued dog, telling each other their secrets. Everything is perfect. Until.
Until. Mack loses control and makes a horrible mistake, and suddenly everything is impossible. How do you survive when the person you love can’t stay?
Stay With Me is about hope against all the odds, and about finding your gift, whatever it is.
Award-winning author Paul Griffin has written a story of first love that is both heartbreaking and uplifting, filled with characters who will change the way you look at the world.
‘Every now and then a writer comes along who combines great storytelling skills with a real gift for prose. Lee Child…Elmore Leonard: these are the guys to whom Paul Griffin will surely be compared one day. Griffin writes with true grace.’ Scott Smith
‘This funny, wrenching, often heartbreaking novel, Griffin’s third, brings contemporary characters and authentic street atmosphere, not to mention dogs and dysfunction, to the age-old story of two teenagers — here, same side of the tracks but different ends of the academic spectrum — in the bliss of first love . . . until, of course, something horrible happens.’ New York Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a narrative spanning 102 days, Mack and C Ce, co-workers at a restaurant and co-narrators of the story, are set up by C Ce's brother, Anthony, and slowly hit it off. C Ce is heartbroken when Anthony joins the army, leaving her alone with their alcoholic mother, whose condition Griffin (The Orange Houses) delicately conveys with profound emotion. Mack, whose mother left him with a bitter alcoholic father, is gentle with the dogs he trains, but he's mentally disturbed psychologically tormented by a hissing noise, "Like when you roll the radio to static and dial up the volume." When the hissing gets loud, generally as a reaction to injustice, Mack turns chillingly violent. As tension builds, readers will likely anticipate that this violence will ignite the conflict that brings Mack and C Ce's relationship to an end, but each step of that journey is authentic, painful, and heartfelt. Griffin's gift at giving voice to deeply flawed, disadvantaged characters without patronizing or oversimplifying their circumstances shines in this moving novel of loss, acceptance, and the possibility of redemption. Ages 14 up.
