Lou W. Stanek

Please note that there are SPOILERS in this review.

This was such an odd book. I read it first as a teen and, while I remember thinking well of it as a time, in rereading it I was less impressed. The twist having do with Joe's death — the fact that Katy shoved him off the ledge, at his bequest, so that Joe won't be stuck living in a paralyzed body — seems so much less shocking when I reread it as an adult. I was more caught up in my reread with the interactions with the adults in the story, and the heavy-handed foreshadowing, and with how annoyingly emo the Katy was depicted to be. This isn't a story that's aged very well.

Did anyone else have trouble pinning down when exactly this book was supposed to take place? It was published in 1991, and I think it was set in the 1970s, but I couldn't find any textual statements to give it a definitive time setting and the whole book was filled with the oddest phrases of slang. "Phony baloney", "petesakes", "corker", "loyal pal", "drip", "card", "man", "party it up", "sexy as hell", "looker", "hunk", "lunkhead" -- and all of this taken from the dialogued teenspeak -- which I believe can range a setting anywhere from the '50s to the '80s. Is there even a single decade that uses all of these phrases? Oy.… (altro)