Kill Me Now
A Novel
-
- 13,99 €
-
- 13,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
One of the Most Anticipated Small Press Books of 2018 (Big Other)
"Timmy Reed writes like a whacked–out angel." —Amber Sparks, author of The Unfinished World and May We Shed These Human Bodies
Miles Lover is an imaginative but insecure adolescent skateboarder with an unfortunate nickname, about to face his first semester of high school in the fall. In Kill Me Now, Miles exists in a liminal space—between junior high and high school, and between three houses: his mother's, his father's, and the now vacant house his family used to call home in a leafy, green neighborhood of north Baltimore. Miles struggles against his parents, his younger identical twin sisters, his probation officer, his old friends, his summer reading list, and his personal essay assignment (having to keep a journal). More than anything, though, he wrestles with himself and the fears that come with growing up.
It's not until Miles begins a mutually beneficial friendship with a new elderly neighbor—whom his sisters spy on and suspect of murder—that he begins to find some understanding of lives different than his own, of the plain acceptance of true friends, and, maybe, just a little of himself in time to start a whole new year. When you're green, you grow, he learns. But when you're ripe, you rot.
With tenderness and tenacity, Timmy Reed's prose—written in a confessional tone via Miles's journal—captures the anguish and grit of adolescence, and the potential of growing up.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The funny if inconsistent latest from Reed (IRL) follows 14-year-old Miles Lover, nicknamed "Retard," through the summer before he begins high school in Baltimore. Though he has a summer assignment to write an essay about himself, he is distracted by skateboarding, brawling, and obsessing about body parts and effluvia. Meanwhile, his former, empty house offers refuge from his parents' bitter divorce and the torture inflicted upon him by his younger twin sisters. If it weren't for Mister Reese, the old man down the street with whom he smokes weed, he'd have no nurturing at all. Miles's narrative voice is neurotic and funny, but as summer drags on, he has little to do but get in trouble, which can grow tedious. Luckily, his friendship with Mister Reese and Resee's home health aide, Nurse Brown, adds necessary warmth and provides him with sources of wisdom. Reed captures all the hilarious grossness of being a teenage boy in this solid coming-of-age story.