Coming of Age
The True Adventures of Two American Teens
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- 5,99 €
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- 5,99 €
Publisher Description
G. Wayne Miller explores the drama and passion teenagers hide from everyone but their peers in this warm, funny, and eye-opening account of two kids from a small New England town as they come of age. As Dave Bettencourt, seventeen, begins his senior year of high school, there are many things he wants to do: be elected class clown; start on the varsity basketball team; turn his high school upside down with his radical underground newspaper, Total Godhead; finally convince his mother, a biology teacher, that he’ll never be a scientist; and take his strikingly beautiful girlfriend, Beth Sunn—whose passion is in-your-face rap—to the prom. Beth’s plans for her sophomore year include: loving Dave forever; being a cheerleader; surviving school; and staying absolutely cool. All over America, teens like Beth and Dave are coming of age in a world that is dramatically different from the one in which most of us grew up. But their experience is universal: They’re falling in love, defying their parents, learning to be independent, and discovering who they are. This is the true story of two kids growing up on Main Street, U.S.A., away from urban violence and the glare of the national media—a place where, despite all the pressures of a new age, it is still possible to believe the good things about being young.
“Offers a sympathetic and insightful portrait of high school life in the heartland.”—Julie Salamon, author of Devil’s Candy
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Is Burrillville High School in northwest Rhode Island a microcosm of small-town kids watching the senior class edging warily toward adulthood? In 1992, Miller, a staff writer at the Providence Journal-Bulletin, began shadowing two lively teens--Dave Bettencourt, at the start of his last year in high school, and Beth, his girlfriend and a provocative sophomore. ``Energy, optimism and refreshing flakiness'' are the observable traits this writer-in-residence enjoys when he joins Dave in a series of adventures, some comical, some not so funny. They involve a radical underground school paper, Dave's stated goal to be named class clown, his serious dating and all the preliminaries to the serious matter of looming adulthood. Miller describes the universal experiences of adolescents growing up in a world quite different from that of their parents' youth. Photos not seen by PW.
