What Do Cowboys Like?
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The scene is a small town in Maine in the 1950s. Louisa Fisher, called “Fish” by her friends, yearns for true love. She also wants to be a writer, hoping for a bestseller before she is twenty. Unnerved by the boys at school with their leering question “What Do Cowboys Like?”, Fish is afraid to show ignorance and makes up for it with fanciful flights of prose in the novel she is secretly penning.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tracy's fresh, likable characters and sure grasp of the teenage female psyche animate her second novel (after Winter Hunger, 1990). As she traces 16-year-old Louisa ``Fish'' Fisher's youth in the late 1950s, the author captures teen angst with visceral detail and acute imagery. Growing up in a small Maine town, Fish longs to be transported out of her bookish world into the realm of real-life experience. Her wish comes true with a vengeance when she falls in love with a boy she has been friends with for years. An aspiring writer, Fish begins a novel, using the events slowly unraveling in her life as fodder-and infusing them with passionate hyperbole. But then her sheltered existence is shaken by a calamity that catapults her into the adult world and affects her so profoundly that she can no longer escape into her writing. Though Fish's intensity drives the narrative, some of the other characters seem inadequately fleshed out, as do the physical descriptions of people and places. Also, the vantage point from which Fish tells her story-that of a middle-aged woman-sometimes drowns out her younger self's voice with knowing observations. Still, Tracy gracefully encompasses teen insecurities, self-consciousness and longings-and beautifully expresses the enduring power of first love.
