The Seven Torments of Amy and Craig (A Love Story)
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
Janesville, Wisconsin (cold in the sense that there is no God)1994
The best thing that's ever happened to Craig is also the worst: Amy. Amy and Craig never should've gotten together. Craig is an awkward Dungeons & Dragons-playing geek, and Amy is the beautiful, fiercely intelligent student-body president of their high school.
Yet somehow they did until Amy dumped him. Then got back together with him. Then dumped him again. Then got back together with him again. Over and over and over.
Unfolding during their senior year, Amy and Craig's exhilarating, tumultuous relationship is a kaleidoscope of joy, pain, and laughter as an uncertain future-and adult responsibility-loom on the horizon.
Craig fights for his dream of escaping Janesville and finding his place at a quirky college, while Amy's quest to uncover her true self sometimes involves being Craig's girlfriend and sometimes doesn't.
Seven heartbreaks. Seven joys. Told nonsequentially, acclaimed playwright Don Zolidis's debut novel is a brutally funny, bittersweet taste of the utterly unique and universal experience of first love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Craig, 17, a D&D master ready to get out of his small town, doesn't expect that way-out-of-his-league Amy, 18, would ever give him a second look ("Amy Carlson was no ordinary hot chick. She was president of everything"). But after Craig joins Youth in Government at the Janesville, Wis., YMCA, which Amy presides over, they fall in love. Chronicling their senior-year relationship in a nonlinear fashion through the unhappy break-ups and the make-ups, debut novelist Zolidis reveals the complicated nature of first love mixed with a healthy dose of complicated family life. Craig's inferiority complex ("It's kind of awful having a twin sister who's a hundred times cooler than you") informs his relationship; Amy, meanwhile, struggles with her own identity crisis, looking for her birth mother, and dealing with a parent undergoing cancer treatments. Paying light homage to John Hughes movies via a mid-'90s setting, Zolidis handles the on-and-off relationship with humor and heart while deftly weaving through the more difficult subject matter. Ages 14 up.)
