21-year-old college student Devin Jones gets a summer job at old-fashioned carnival and amusement park Joyland, trying to mend his broken heart, after his girlfriend left him for another. Working at Joyland, he’s taught the ways of the experienced carnies, discovers his knack for entertaining children while “wearing the fur” of park mascot Howie the Hound, lays the foundation of some life-long friendships and discovers the legend of the genuinely haunted House of Horror, where a young woman in a blue dress and an alice […]
Secrets and Lies OR Unhappy Families Make Great Novels
Thanks to the CBR7 folks whose positive reviews of this book helped put it on my radar when I was in the airport gift store, looking for something to read. Celeste Ng has created a powerful novel (I can’t believe it’s a debut) that captures the complexity of many things—growing up in the Midwest in the 1970’s, being the Other in a variety of situations, and the way parents and children fail to understand each other. The novel begins with the drowning death of Lydia […]
How can you be a teenage misfit when your parents applaud and encourage rebellion?
Nikolaj moves to a newly constructed house in a suburb in one of the counties surrounding Oslo in the early 1970s. His father is one of the architects who planned the area, and is full of dreams about the social opportunities the new affordable housing will mean for families in the area. As it turns out, most of the families who move in stick to a rigid routine of conformity and normality – their children wear the same thing, cut their hair the same way, […]