A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip
A Memoir of Seventh Grade
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
At age twelve, Kevin Brockmeier is ready to become a different person: not the boy he has always been—the one who cries too easily and laughs too easily, who lives in an otherland of sparkling daydreams and imaginary catastrophes—but someone else altogether.
Over the course of one school year—seventh grade—he sets out in search of himself. Along the way, he happens into his first kiss at a church party, struggles to understand why his old friends tease him at the lunch table, becomes the talk of the entire school thanks to his Halloween costume, and booby-traps his lunch to deter a thief.
With the same deep feeling and oddly dreamlike precision that are the hallmarks of his fiction, the acclaimed novelist now explores the dream of his own past and recovers the person he used to be.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Brockmeier (The Illumination) experiments with the memoir form as he guides readers through the 12th year of his life in this finely tuned portrait of a tween growing up in suburban Little Rock, Ark. in 1980s. Narrated in the third person, Brockmeier reflects on the sensitive kid he once was: "the kid who crie too easily" and was constantly concerned with social norms, Kevin cannot help but draw attention to himself. When Kevin is blindsided by former friends who become his teasing tormentors, he escapes into a science fiction-esque alternate universe. The confusion and anguish of the scenario is captured astutely by Brockmeier, who describes the school setting vividly with its "lockers crashing shut like cymbals," "Levis, Izods and bomber jackets," and "vending machines with their coils of chips and candy." This genre-spanning work is short on plot but bursting with eloquence, a striking slice of life aching with nostalgia.