In Zanesville
A Novel
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3.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From the acclaimed author of The Boys of My Youth and Festival Days, a “mesmerizing… beautifully written” debut novel that evokes the wrenching, exquisite moment just before we step into adulthood (Ann Patchett).
The fourteen-year-old narrator of In Zanesville is a late bloomer. She flies under the radar — a sidekick, a marching-band dropout, a disastrous babysitter. Luckily, she has a best friend with whom she shares the everyday adventures of a 1970s American girlhood, incidents through which a world is revealed and character is forged.
In time, the two girls' friendship is tested — by their families' claims on them, by a clique of popular girls who stumble upon them, and by their first startling, subversive intimations of womanhood.
With dry wit and piercing observation, Jo Ann Beard shows us that in the seemingly quiet streets of America's innumerable Zanesvilles is a universe of wonders, and that within the souls of the awkward and the overlooked often burns something radiant.
"Probably my favorite novel of the year...A marvelous reading experience...I don't think I'll ever forget the unnamed, perfectly realized narrator of In Zanesville." —Nancy Pearl, NPR
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thirteen years after Beard's acclaimed essay collection, Boys of My Youth, she brings readers this smashing coming-of-age story. It's the 1970s and the novel's unnamed 14-year-old narrator is beginning high school after a summer spent in close company with her best friend, Felicia, as the two babysit an unruly set of six kids the novel opens with one of the kids setting their house on fire. With freshman year comes realizations that many adolescent girls have faced, some overwhelming, some slight, but all spot-on: marching band is for dorks, boys are confusing, and even the tightest of friendships can fracture when popularity is at stake. Underlying this teenager's turmoil are problems in the grown-up world, such as her father's alcoholism, her mother's abiding unhappiness, and the death of a friend's mother all things she tries to ignore, but which occasionally boil to the surface. Beard is a faultless chronicler of the young and hopeful; readers couldn't ask for a better guide for a trip through the wilds of adolescence.
