The Martin Chronicles
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A powerful and heartfelt coming-of-age novel that follows Martin Kelso as he grows up in 1980s New York and faces the magic of first experiences, as well as the heartbreak of hard-won life lessons. Martin Kelso's comfortable world starts to change at the age of eleven. Girls get under his skin in ways he never noticed before. His cousin Evie, who used to be Marty's closest confidante--the one who taught him the right way to eat a pizza and how to catch tadpoles--has grown up into a stranger, mysterious and unpredictable. Marty and his best friends once inhabited fantasy worlds of their own making, full of cowboys and cops and robbers, where the heroes always won the day. But now, as neighborhood kids are attacked on their walk to school, they find themselves wanting to play a new game that better prepares them for real life. As life changes quickly and Marty feels less secure with himself, the difference between games and reality, friend and foe, and right from wrong becomes much more difficult to distinguish. At the same time, this new world offers possibilities as exciting as they are frightening. This poignant debut perfectly captures the intense emotion, humor, and earnestness of young adulthood as Marty, age eleven to seventeen, navigates a series of life-changing firsts: first kiss, first enemy, first loss, and, ultimately, his first awareness that the world is not as simple a place as he had once imagined. Includes a Reading Group Guide.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in Manhattan's Upper West Side in the 1980s, Fried's uneven debut novel follows Marty Kelso as he ages from tween to teen, beginning with him in sixth grade and ending with his high school graduation. After a water pipe bursts at their "sister middle school," Marty and his best friends, Dave and Max, are confronted with attending a school with girls for the first time. On top of this seismic shift, Marty's cousin Evie has also temporarily moved in to his house after the death of her father. Drifting episodically from Mr. Harding's middle school English classroom to summer camp to the brink of his graduation, Marty sees his once-steady friendships become strained as romantic relationships come into play. Unfortunately, an overabundance of clich causes the tale to reflect the awkwardness of its pubescent protagonist a bit too closely. Rain hammers an air conditioner "like a drumroll"; a rifle fires like "a firecracker going off." However, when the excessive simile usage settles down, Fried's lighthearted humor shines through, as when Marty gets stuck in an elevator with an elderly neighbor: "I reached out and felt her hand. Ice cold. Dead, I worried. Terrific, I thought." While Fried's novel offers playful moments and an evocative atmosphere, these vignettes never come together into a fully formed story.