Saint Susan (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | David Richard Smith | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

Saint Susan is the prequel to David R. Smith's campus novel The Campbell Club (2024). We find Robbie Gray again navigating a campus, this time the Kickshaw Preparatory School for Boys in Southern California. Saint Susan is also an historical novel, probably a romance at heart, if a story about a boy's love for his lost mother can be considered a romance. Our time period is the late 70s America.
I have called Saint Susan 'Young Adult fiction' because it is concerned with the lives of teenagers and because the POV character is a teenage boy, who narrates the story in the first person. Like all YA fiction, Saint Susan chronicles the search for identity by its various characters: Robbie, the young con-man and habitual liar, Christian, the pot-smoking athlete, William, the D & D dungeon-master and artist. Along the way we deal with adult themes: drugs, sex, puberty, group showers, and forbidden love. But at its core, Saint Susan is about the quest for friendship and love in a lonely world, where success is everything, fear of disappointing a parent can ruin a life, and overpowering emotion is only a kiss away. Life is fleeting and we lose people we love on this journey.
The book contains discussions, but not depictions, of homosexuality, both among adult men and among teen boys, and considerable drug and alcohol use is on display. Note that the book also contains depictions of self-harm and suicide. Susan, who I will not say too much about to avoid spoilers, is beatific and has the stigmata to prove it. So the story is not appropriate for everyone. To be fair, the story also contains uplifting depictions of love, kindness, giving, and friendship. Large parts of the book are funny (or at least are intended to be funny, that's how I see it). This is some of my best writing and I would not want you to miss it due to any concerns about the content. I don't think there's even an explicit sex scene in the whole book. That's a departure from my previous books but I wanted to make this one softer.