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Overview
The Doo Dads are singing "My Girl" on the radio and fourteen-year-old Gary is studying pictures of naked women, aware that Grandpa is looking down from heaven wondering how the boy turned out so badly. He has never so much as kissed a girl, except his rebellious cousin Kate, a sophisticate of seventeen who knows about The New Yorker and also how to swear and exhale smoke rings. But this is a summer of change for Gary: he fights back against his bullying born-again sister and his tyrannical teacher, and most significantly, he receives an Underwood typewriter-a typewriter that will help Gary believe he can become a writer. With his trademark gift for treading "a line delicate as a cobweb between satire and sentiment" (The Cleveland Plain Dealer), Keillor's touching and funny novel brilliantly captures a newly minted America and delivers an unforgettable comedy about the universal aspects of adolescence-from first loves to fear and fascination with bodily functions.
The folks of Lake Wobegon don't have much patience for a kid's ungodly obsessions, and so Gary manages to filter the hormonal earthquake that is puberty and his hopeless devotion to glamorous, rebellious Kate through his fantastic yarns. With every marvelous story he moves a few steps closer to becoming a writer.
Synopsis
The Doo Dads are singing "My Girl" on the radio and fourteen-year-old Gary is studying pictures of naked women, aware that Grandpa is looking down from heaven wondering how the boy turned out so badly. He has never so much as kissed a girl, except his rebellious cousin Kate, a sophisticate of seventeen who knows about The New Yorker and also how to swear and exhale smoke rings. But this is a summer of change for Gary: he fights back against his bullying born-again sister and his tyrannical teacher, and most significantly, he receives an Underwood typewriter-a typewriter that will help Gary believe he can become a writer. With his trademark gift for treading "a line delicate as a cobweb between satire and sentiment" (The Cleveland Plain Dealer), Keillor's touching and funny novel brilliantly captures a newly minted America and delivers an unforgettable comedy about the universal aspects of adolescence-from first loves to fear and fascination with bodily functions.
Book Magazine
The latest installment of Keillor's Lake Wobegon series reconciles the romantic conventions of the coming-of-age novel with the obsessions more typical of a teenage boy (farts and sex). The fourteen-year-old hero describes himself as a "tree toad" and despairs that his experience with the "luscious orbs" that elicit such "a happy twitching in his shorts" will forever be confined to the well-thumbed pages of his magazines. Otherwise, what little plot there is generally casts Gary as spectator and commentator as he lusts after his sexually precocious cousin, becomes a fledgling sportswriter covering the town's minor-league baseball team and probes the secrets of his fundamentally religious family. Though the narrator possesses a verbal facility unlikely for one so young, Keillor's eye for evocative detail and penchant for parody give the novel the breezy charm of a summer reverie. A companion volume, In Search of Lake Wobegon, features the photography of Richard Olsenius and includes text by Keillor, who relates how his experience in small-town Minnesota (including Freeport and Holdingford) inspired the invention of the fictional community where his latest novel is set. Olsenius' handsome and austere photos of rural Minnesota document families, farmlands and rituals (including the annual "blessing of the snowmobiles"). "Culture isn't decor," writes Keillor, "it's what you know before you're twelve. It sticks with you all your born days.... It doesn't draw its identity from the media, it draws it out of the past, like well water."
Don McLeese
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewThere are good writers and then there are good storytellers. Garrison Keillor is both. The popular host and creator of Minnesota Public Radio's The Prairie Home Companion brings us back to the quirky and endearing fictional town of Lake Wobegon for a bawdy and affectionate story of one young man's hilarious and poignant coming-of-age.
In Lake Wobegon Summer 1956, 14-year-old Gary, looking like "a tree toad who was changed into a boy, but not completely" is in the tortured throes of puberty. Gifted with an active imagination and cursed with raging hormones, the young "pencil-necked geek" finds himself smitten with his comely older cousin, Kate. To make matters worse, a friend slips him a copy of a porno mag, High School Orgies, which only adds fuel to his already fiery, soft-core fantasies about his not-so-distant relative. With the help of his Underwood typewriter (a gift from his Uncle Sugar), these daydreams soon take form as ribald short stories that, more often than not, land our young hero in a heap of trouble with his family -- devout Christian fundamentalists of the Sanctified Brethren. While Gary deals with his mixed-up emotions and struggles to discover his voice as a writer, Kate finds herself caught up in a scandal with a local boy, an up-and-coming pitcher for the Wobegon Whippets. All this leads to a family showdown that will change their lives forever.
Now this may all sound like well-trodden ground, but Keillor has the unique gift of making you remember people you've never met before, so that the characters are fresh and familiar at the same time (like those offbeat yet endearing relatives you only see once a year...and at funerals). And for all its bathroom humor and descriptions of "luscious orbs" and "ball-peen hammers," Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 is really just an old-fashioned tale of first love and the sometimes crushing consequences that occur when innocence and experience clash. It's also a touching story about the bonds of family and the sadness of growing up -- and growing apart from those you held dear as a child.
Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 proves that Garrison Keillor is the closest thing we have to a modern-day Mark Twain. He is a national treasure. This is a jewel. (Stephen Bloom)
The latest installment of Keillor's Lake Wobegon series reconciles the romantic conventions of the coming-of-age novel with the obsessions more typical of a teenage boy (farts and sex). The fourteen-year-old hero describes himself as a "tree toad" and despairs that his experience with the "luscious orbs" that elicit such "a happy twitching in his shorts" will forever be confined to the well-thumbed pages of his magazines. Otherwise, what little plot there is generally casts Gary as spectator and commentator as he lusts after his sexually precocious cousin, becomes a fledgling sportswriter covering the town's minor-league baseball team and probes the secrets of his fundamentally religious family. Though the narrator possesses a verbal facility unlikely for one so young, Keillor's eye for evocative detail and penchant for parody give the novel the breezy charm of a summer reverie. A companion volume, In Search of Lake Wobegon, features the photography of Richard Olsenius and includes text by Keillor, who relates how his experience in small-town Minnesota (including Freeport and Holdingford) inspired the invention of the fictional community where his latest novel is set. Olsenius' handsome and austere photos of rural Minnesota document families, farmlands and rituals (including the annual "blessing of the snowmobiles"). "Culture isn't decor," writes Keillor, "it's what you know before you're twelve. It sticks with you all your born days.... It doesn't draw its identity from the media, it draws it out of the past, like well water."
—Don McLeese