Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Mount Angel Public Library | +CORMIER | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Eugene is remembering the summer of 1938 in Frenchtown, a time when he began to wonder "what I was doing here on the planet Earth." Here in vibrant, exquisite detail are his lovely mother, his aunts and uncles, cousins and friends, and especially his beloved, enigmatic father. Here, too, is the world of a mill town: the boys swimming in a brook that is red or purple or green, depending on the dyes dumped that day by the comb shop; the visit of the ice man; and the boys' trips to the cemetery or the forbidden railroad tracks. And here also is a darker world--the mystery of a girl murdered years before. Robert Cormier's touching, funny, melancholy chronicle of a vanished world celebrates a son's connection to his father and human relationships that are timeless. From the Paperback edition.
Author Notes
Robert Cormier began writing novels for adults, but established his reputation as an author of books for young adults, earning critical acclaim with three books, each of which were named New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year: The Chocolate War (1974), I Am the Cheese (1977), and After the First Dark (1979).
Cormier was born on January 17, 1925, in Leominster, Mass., where his eighth-grade teacher first discovered his ability to write. Cormier worked as a commercial writer at WTAG-Radio in Worcester, Mass. He also worked as a newspaper reporter and columnist at the Worcester Telegram and Gazette and at the Fitchburg Sentinel. Cormier received the Best Human Interest Story of the Year Award from the Associated Press of New England in 1959 and 1973. He also earned the Best Newspaper Column Award from K.R. Thomson Newspapers, Inc., in 1974.
Cormier, who is sometimes inspired by news stories or family events, is known for having serious themes in his work, such as manipulation, abuse of authority, and the ordinariness of evil. These themes are also evident in many of his more than 15 books.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 6 Up-A touching, almost nostalgic coming-of-age story. Set shortly after World War I in the Frenchtown section of industrial Monument, MA, the novel centers on Eugene whose 12th summer is filled with new experiences. He falls in love for the first time (with a piano-teaching nun named Sister Angelica), gets a job, and sees his first airplane. Eugene also experiences a profound loss when his favorite uncle suddenly dies. His initial steps into adolescence prompt him to turn inward and think about the relationships in his life. He wishes he were closer to his father, whom he describes as being as "unknowable as a foreign language." Like Karen Hesse's Out of the Dust (Scholastic, 1997) and Mel Glenn's stories in poetry, this novel is written completely in verse, and is as masterful as Cormier's prose. The vivid descriptions of the Frenchtown tenement are positively haunting. Readers will see the faces of the characters and feel Eugene's struggle to understand his emotions. Despite its early 20th-century setting, Frenchtown Summer is not a historical novel. It is a sensitive, superbly crafted story of a boy's journey into self-awareness.-Edward Sullivan, New York Public Library (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
More wistful but equally as haunting as Cormier's usual fare, this novel in verse shapes an impressionistic portrait of a lonely, keenly observant boy living in post-WWI Frenchtown (also the setting for the novel Fade). Twelve-year-old Eugene finds his father enigmatic and distant: "My father was a silhouette,/ as if obscured/ by a light shining behind him./ He was closer to me waving from the street/ than nearby in the tenement/ or walking beside me." While hoping for some sign of paternal love or approval, Eugene quietly and contemplatively penetrates the secrets of Frenchtown. He watches as Mrs. Cartin contemplates taking a leap from the third-floor, stands by as a one-time friend becomes an outcast after a bout with St. Vitus' dance and connects his favorite uncle to an unsolved murder case. Every observation implies mystery and hidden dramas; while the short verse chapters seem less plot-driven than Cormier fans may expect, they subtly convey the shadows in Frenchtown and the action those shadows conceal. Feeling "as transparent as rain," Eugene is a ghostly presence here, taking readers back in time and slowly mesmerizing them with his memories of coming of age. Ages 12-up. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
(Intermediate, Young Adult) What an astonishment that the grandmaster of the YA novel has turned to poetry at this point in his career. And yet the enterprise has a sense of inevitability about it, because our immediate realization on opening these pages is that Robert Cormier had been writing blank verse all along but we just hadn't noticed. Check out the opening paragraphs of I Am the Cheese, the closing paragraphs of Tenderness, the descriptions of the transition to the Fade and the flight of the Bumblebee. In other ways, too, this work is a distillation of what has gone before. Cormieresque themes and symbols reveal themselves to the knowledgeable reader: the lonely, bookish boy; the bully; the snarling dog; the smell of lilacs; nuns in the classroom and priests in the confessional; hidden and revealed identity; dark secrets under the surface of ordinary life; forgiveness and redemption. The people and places, too, are familiar: the tenements, streets, and back alleys of Frenchtown; the comb factories; St. Jude's Catholic Church; the crochety shop owners. All familiar from Cormier's other novels, and yet the effect is fresh and newly intense in this story of a summer in which a young boy comes to understand his silent and withdrawn father. Warm, poignant; dare we say tender? But this is Cormier, after all, who can never resist a dark and ambivalent drama, and so this is also the summer when the boy finds proof (perhaps) of something he must never reveal about his beloved uncle Med and Marielle LeMoyne, who was found strangled with ""a yellow necktie with black stripes coiled like a snake around her neck."" A treat for Cormier fans, and a revelation for others. patty campbell (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Gr. 7^-12. It is the summer of 12-year-old Eugene's first paper route, a job that sends him on "Sahara afternoons" through "the tenement canyons of Frenchtown," an unseen observer of other lives and a searcher for his own identity. Because he's a reader, he isn't "famous in the schoolyard" like his athletic brother, Raymond. And so, unnoticed, he is free to observe the world around him--a near suicide, the death of a classmate, his father at night. He falls in love with a visiting nun, pretends to ride the rails, and gets his first pair of glasses. Cormier narrates Eugene's discoveries in free verse, which is lyrical, evocative, and masterful in its capacity to reveal the hidden emotional truths of interior lives. "I walked," Eugene muses, "not knowing yet that the deep emptiness inside me was loneliness." Like Sherwood Anderson or Edwin Arlington Robinson, Cormier finds the universal in the small, sometimes mysterious moments of unsung lives. But Eugene's summer is full, too, of larger "unanswered questions and mysteries": the long-ago murder of a young woman, the inexplicable tragedy that befalls a favorite uncle, and--the greatest mystery of all--the man who is Eugene's own silent father. Because Cormier is so successful at conveying Eugene's desperate longing for his distant father's approval and love, his father's ultimate validation, when it arrives, is deeply satisfying. Heartbreak becomes heart ease, as Cormier continues to demonstrate his unrivalled power to dazzle and delight his readers. --Michael Cart
Library Journal Review
Gr 6 Up-In taut verse, Eugene provides verbal snapshots of his town, the enigmatic adults around him, and his own growing sense of self. A lyrical tour de force that packs an emotional wallop. (Sept.) (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.