“That moment when we realize our parents are people, regular people, with flaws and separate lives we have no access to. Brought home, made palpable for the reader, in that little clattering spoon”: Kent Kosack on Lucia Berlin’s coming-of-age story “Itinerary.”
Mannequin Girl, Ellen Litman’s second novel, is a coming-of-age story and a family drama set in a Moscow boarding school for children with scoliosis.
J.T. Bushnell reviews Benjamin Lytal’s coming-of-age debut novel, “a vision of youth from the inside.”
What do books about octogenarians share with teen vampire novels? Four recent books with more angst than a high school cafeteria.
A bookish fifteen-year-old breaches taboos in the small New England town of Wick. Poet Rebecca Wolff’s masterful first novel is an Appalachian folk ballad rendered gothic–full of sex and ghosts, mixing caution and temptation, obsessed with origins but somehow timeless.
The appeal of Jo Ann Beard’s coming-of-age novel In Zanesville transcends both age and gender.
This week’s feature is Bonnie Jo Campbell’s novel Once Upon a River (Norton, 2011). Campbell grew up on a small farm in Michigan and studied philosophy at the University of Chicago. She received her MFA from Western Michigan University, and now lives outside of Kalamazoo. She is the author of a previous novel, Q Road (Scribner, 2003), and two collections, Women and Other Animals (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), which won the AWP prize for short fiction, and American Salvage (Wayne State University Press, 2009), which was a finalist in 2009 for both the National Book Award in Fiction and […]
