Waiting on Wednesday
Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme, hosted by Breaking the Spine. What you basically do is you post about a book that highlights an upcoming release.
My choice: Rodin's Debutante
by Ward Just
Pub Date: 03/01/2011
Genre: Fiction/Adult: literary
By Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Tommy Ogden, a Gatsbyesque character living in a mansion outside robber-baron-era Chicago, declines to give his wife the money to commission a bust of herself from the French master Rodin and announces instead his intention to endow a boys' school. Ogden's decision reverberates years later in the life of Lee Goodell, whose coming of age is at the heart of Ward Just's emotionally potent new novel.
Just's signature skill of conveying emotional heft with few words is put into play as Lee confronts the meaning of his four years at Ogden Hall School under the purview, in the school library, of a bust known as Rodin's Debutante. And, especially, as he meets again a childhood friend, the victim of a brutal sexual assault of which she has no memory. It was a crime marking the end of Lee's boyhood and the beginning of his understanding—so powerfully under the surface of Just's masterly story—that how and what we remember add up to nothing less than our very lives.
I'm really exited for this book and the best thing is that I just received an advanced reading-copy to review!
What's your pick?
My choice: Rodin's Debutante
by Ward Just
Pub Date: 03/01/2011
Genre: Fiction/Adult: literary
By Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Tommy Ogden, a Gatsbyesque character living in a mansion outside robber-baron-era Chicago, declines to give his wife the money to commission a bust of herself from the French master Rodin and announces instead his intention to endow a boys' school. Ogden's decision reverberates years later in the life of Lee Goodell, whose coming of age is at the heart of Ward Just's emotionally potent new novel. Lee's life decisions—to become a sculptor, to sojourn in the mean streets of the South Side, to marry into the haute-intellectual culture of Hyde Park—play out against the crude glamour of midcentury Chicago.
Just's signature skill of conveying emotional heft with few words is put into play as Lee confronts the meaning of his four years at Ogden Hall School under the purview, in the school library, of a bust known as Rodin's Debutante. And, especially, as he meets again a childhood friend, the victim of a brutal sexual assault of which she has no memory. It was a crime marking the end of Lee's boyhood and the beginning of his understanding—so powerfully under the surface of Just's masterly story—that how and what we remember add up to nothing less than our very lives.
I'm really exited for this book and the best thing is that I just received an advanced reading-copy to review!
What's your pick?
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