This collection of two
novellas showcases Jen Michalski’s varying skills as a writer. In “I Can
Make It to California Before It’s Time for Dinner,” Michalski examines
the dangers of living in a world while having a compromised reality. In a
first-person narrative, the reader follows Jimmy, a mentally challenged
fourteen-year-old boy who accidentally kills a neighborhood girl. He
winds up running away and hitching a ride with a trucker who is not as
trustworthy a companion as Jimmy believes him to be.
In
“May-September,” which won first place in Press 53’s Open Awards in
2010, a young writer is hired by a much-older woman over the summer to
help blog her memoirs for her grandchildren. An unlikely friendship, and
more, follows, as Michalski examines one of the last cultural taboos of
our age: May-December romances. Michalski is also the author of the
novel THE TIDE KING (forthcoming, 2013 Black Lawrence Press) and lives
in Baltimore.
Is this a book that would make your to read list?
As a rule novellas are not long enough to be satisfying for me. It would be very rare for me to pick up this book. I'm not loving the story lines as outlined either.
How to get your child to read that book from the library!
- tooptimistic
on Mar. 8, 2013 at 5:47 PM