En los suburbios de Chicago en los años veinte, dos chicos inician una insólita amistad: Lymie Peters, un muchacho delgado y un poco torpe que siempre saca buenas notas, y el recién llegado Spud Latham, un auténtico atleta y estudiante mediocre. Spud acepta la devoción de Lymie sin cuestionarla, pero al terminar la escuela secundaria y comenzar la universidad, aparecen las primeras tensiones entre ellos. Lymie es el primero en conocer a Sally Forbes, pero ella se enamorará de Spud, y este hecho marcará el inicio del distanciamiento entre los dos amigos. Pero la ruptura es más de lo que Lymie podrá soportar. He aquí un conmovedor retrato de la adolescencia y el paso de la juventud a la edad adulta.

Unforgettable scenes. A strong friendship that I admired for its durability. The characters are unexpected and unpredictable, as is the plot. ( )

'a beautifully observed rite of passage, as much about growing up as friendship'
By sally tarbox on 26 July 2012
Format: Paperback
Exquisitely written account of friendship, love and shyness.
Lymie is an intelligent but puny kid, ever excluded by the others. When he becomes friends with tough new boy Spud, a kid who fits in with the rest, the relationship becomes intense- on Lymie's side at least- but unspoken issues arise between the two at college...
This part was so beautifully written; a lesser author might have broken up the friendship with an argument, but Lymie continues to hang around Spud -who allows him to while barely acknowledging him, in a heartbreaking episode.
The reader totally understands the kind of guy Lymie is to the rest of the world:
'The boys in the fraternity were friendly toward Lymie and accepted him, but as an outsider, a foreigner with all the proper credentials. Their attitude was a good enough indication of what he could accept socially, the rest of his life. If he had been the kind of person who mixes easily and makes a good first impression, he wouldn't have walked past the plate glass window of LeClerc's pastry shop, years before when he was in high school.'
Beautiful, heart-rending, showing a total understanding of human interaction. ( )

For the most part this book bored me. The plot mainly revolves around "Spud" Latham and Lymie Peters and their strange relationship, which oscillates and shifts between average friendship, master-servant, and ambiguous love. A girl named Sally is introduced half way through the book, but despite the fact that she is often presented as the third point of a triangle the narrative is really centered on the two boys. Didn't find the story particularly compelling, brought to mind a soap opera set in the 1920s, but it wasn't bad either. What bogged me down was the writing. Maxwell loves to describe scenery and things happening around the characters that have little or no bearing on them, and this goes on for pages with prose I didn't find impressive. Maxwell also has a penchant for extended metaphors, whether it be hazing as the primeval ritual, life as an obstacle course, or the cruelty of existence as a desert, that aren't half as clever as he thinks they are. Cut down to a lean novella I might have found The Folded Leaf decent, though even then it would have been far from great, but as it stands I found it thoroughly meh. 2.5 stars. ( )

Lymie and Spud become inseparable best friends when they are teenagers in Chicago in the 1920s, but once they go to college together, they begin to grow apart, and it's bad. ( )