I Love You, Miss Huddleston
And Other Inappropriate Longings of My Indiana Childhood
-
-
4.1 • 18 Ratings
-
-
- $13.99
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
In the vein of Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, with a dash of some of the homegrown nostalgia of The Dangerous Book for Boys and A Prairie Home Companion, humorist Philip Gulley (Front Porch Tales, Home to Harmony) tells of his coming of age in small-town Indiana.
It was a time of questionable role models, half-baked schemes, and unrelieved and happy chaos.
Small Town Indiana: From aggravating the police dog at the county jail to learning life lessons from quirky neighbors, life in Danville was anything but boring.Funny Family Stories: Join a family who wins a house in a poker game (or so the story goes), survives on a diet of tomatoes, and wages war on bugs with an arsenal of their father’s bug spray.Childhood Adventures: Follow along on a quest to build a bicycle from dump parts, a disastrous camping trip to Turkey Run, and a town-wide Halloween candy heist that went deliciously wrong.Coming of Age Story: From a disastrous first attempt at dancing to an epic, unrequited love for his sixth-grade teacher, Miss Huddleston, this is a nostalgic look back at the awkward glory of growing up.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Some kids were evidently not unhappy growing up, but they can still get pretty good childhood memoirs, especially if they are honest about exaggerating. Quaker pastor-author Gulley (the Harmony series) writes a low-key Hoosier who's who in this memoir set in Danville, Ind., where youthful acting out takes the form of hurling tomatoes and detonating cans of bug spray. Danville includes Quaker widows aplenty, pals named Peanut and Suds, an arthritic and deaf police dog and a mousery that provisions Indiana's homegrown pharmaceutical manufacturer, Eli Lilly. Gulley has no shortage of material, and the teenage years naturally bring an attack of hormones that prompts pathetic, doomed crushes. We even manage to learn a few facts about the humorist, such as that Gulley grew up Catholic. His chief object of fun is his youthful self, which takes the edge off his views of other characters from his youth, many of whom are relatives. Humor beats nostalgia and drama; this stuff is a laugh-out-loud tweaking of a not terribly misspent youth.
