Six Picks...Timeless Coming of Age Stories

  • OUT STEALING HORSES by Per Petterson

    This  novel has been embraced world-wide as a literary classic, a novel of relevance and power. Panoramic and gripping, it tells the story of Trond Sander, a 67 year old man who has moved from the city to a remote, riverside cabin, only to have all the unresolved turbulence, grief, and overwhelming natural beauty of his youth come back to him. This book won the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
    BUY THIS BOOK

  • THE CATCHER IN THE RYE by JDSalinger

    Holden Caulfield is still the best friend of adolescents world-wide.  This classic, published in 1951, shows us that you could write to someone you’d never met as if you were talking to someone you’ve known forever.  Salinger’s writing demostrates that the smallest of gestures reveals all that you really need to know about a character; humor and pain exist on the page beside each other, if not inside each other.  No author has come close to what Salinger did in THE CATCHER IN THE RYE.
    BUY THIS BOOK

  • A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY by John Irving

    This is a fully articulated novel with a moral vision.  The main action of this book begins when the narrator’s mother  dies after being struck in the head by a foul ball.  If there seems to be something random in this event, bad things happen to good people with regularity in Irving’s novel.  Few contemporary storytellers compare with Irving’s scope of characterization.
    BUY THIS BOOK

  • A DEATH IN THE FAMILY by James Agee

    This masterpiece,  in which the child’s point of view reflects particular ways of looking, speaking, remembering, inventing, and bearing witness to events forged in childhood,  is literature of the highest order.  A father’s sudden death becomes an inquiry into identity itself.
    BUY THIS BOOK

  • YELLOW RAFT IN BLUE WATER by Michael Dorris

    This is a vivid tale of  reservation life, told through the voices of three generations of Native American women.  The youngest of these, fifteen year old Rayona – a bronco-riding, tough-minded girl – has a voice that sticks in your mind.
    BUY THIS BOOK

  • MIDDLESEX by Jeffrey Eugenides

    The perfect coming-of-age novel for book groups, this is about Calliope Stephanides and three generations of her Greek-American family.  The family begins in a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus and ends up in Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing the heyday of the Motor City, the race riots of ’67, and then they move  upward to idyllic Grosse Pointe, Michigan.
    BUY THIS BOOK