Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You (Paperback)
| Author: Peter Cameron |
| Format: | Paperback |
Product Details:
| This is the story of one summer in the life of James Sveck, aged eighteen. James is a sophisticated, vulnerable young man with a deep appreciation for the world, and no idea how to live in it. His parents are suspect, his sister is pretentious, and the world that awaits him in the form of college and a career looks frightening and bleak. It''s the story of a moment in adolescence when the next step seems too momentous to even contemplate, when the mere prospect of love is overwhelming, when the mysteries of the adult world seem both terrifying and irresistible. |
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From the Publisher:
Unable to trust his parents and pretentious sister, eighteen-year-old James Sveck finds the summer after his graduation from high school overshadowed by the daunting challenges of college, career prospects, and romantic possibilities. By the author of |Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is the story of James Sveck, a sophisticated, vulnerable young man with a deep appreciation for the world and no idea how to live in it. James is eighteen, the child of divorced parents living in Manhattan. Articulate, sensitive, and cynical, he rejects all of the assumptions that govern the adult world around him--including the expectation that he will go to college in the fall. he would prefer to move to an old house in a small town somewhere in the Midwest. Someday This Pain Will BE Useful to You takes place over a few broiling days in the summer of 2003 as James confides in his sympathetic grandmother, stymies his canny therapist, deplores his pretentious sister, and devises a fake online identity in order to pursue his crush on a much older coworker. Nothing turns out how he'd expected.| "Possibly one of the all-time great New York books, not to mention an archly comic gem" (Peter Gadol, LA Weekly), Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is the insightful, powerfully moving story of a young man questioning his times, his family, his world, and himself. | |
Themes of alienation, repressed sexuality, and fear of adulthood run through Peter Cameron's first young adult novel, along with humor and pathos. James Sveck is a severely alienated 18-year-old who can't understand his peers, finds the prospect of going to Brown in the fall deeply uncompelling, and spends his spare time on the internet searching for beautiful homes in the Midwest. Chronicled over the course of a stifling New York City summer, this tale of James's awkward attempts at sexual exploration, avoidance of his future, and humorous family dynamics spells out the suffering that, for many, is what adolescence is all about. Both a 2007 Publishers Weekly Best Children's Book and Kirkus Reviews Best Young-Adult Book.
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