10th Grade

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY NOV 19, 2001

Weisberg touches plenty of familiar bases in this pedestrian debut novel, a coming-of-age affair that tracks protagonist Jeremy Reskin's second year of high school in the vanilla New Jersey suburb of Hurst Falls. Jeremy is a bright, reasonably popular and athletic adolescent who plays soccer, gets decent grades and has an ordinary family life with two sisters, a penny-pinching but well-meaning lawyer father and housewife mom. The plot weaves around the arrival of a sexy new classmate, Renee Shopmaker, who quickly touches Jeremy's heart after she becomes his dialogue partner in Spanish class. But it takes the entire narrative for Jeremy even to consider the possibility of seriously dating Renee, something he muses about during their final conversation after each winds up with a different date at the prom. In between, Jeremy spends his time dealing with the semiromantic friendship of a serious, rather melodramatic girl named Gillian until their potential relationship peters out just before the prom. Weisberg captures the essence of adolescent stream-of-consciousness in Jeremy's narration, and he sensitively presents the usual array of coming-of-age scenes, including Jeremy's sexual initiation, a bonding trip to New York with his dad, his exploits with the soccer team and his first foray into the world of drugs and alcohol. But the absence of any romantic developments between Jeremy and Renee makes the ordinary scenes seem all the more bland; the result is a decent novel of character with little to distinguish it from the raft of genre fodder. Weisberg is a solid storyteller who knows his way around his characters, but he'll need some stronger plot lines to build on this debut novel.