Literary Collections

What Do Cowboys Like?

Name: What Do Cowboys Like?
Author: Ann B. Tracy
ISBN: 9781579620554

by Ann B. Tracy

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Synopsis

Product Description Dreaming of true love and a career as a writer, Louise Fisher, known as "Fish" by her friends, responds to adolescence and its turbulent questions by indulging in a fanciful imaginary life, until the real world intrudes upon her innocence and fantasies. IP. From Publishers Weekly Tracy's fresh, likable characters and sure grasp of the teenage female psyche animate her second novel (after Winter Hunger, 1990). As she traces 16-year-old Louisa "Fish" Fisher's youth in the late 1950s, the author captures teen angst with visceral detail and acute imagery. Growing up in a small Maine town, Fish longs to be transported out of her bookish world into the realm of real-life experience. Her wish comes true with a vengeance when she falls in love with a boy she has been friends with for years. An aspiring writer, Fish begins a novel, using the events slowly unraveling in her life as fodder-and infusing them with passionate hyperbole. But then her sheltered existence is shaken by a calamity that catapults her into the adult world and affects her so profoundly that she can no longer escape into her writing. Though Fish's intensity drives the narrative, some of the other characters seem inadequately fleshed out, as do the physical descriptions of people and places. Also, the vantage point from which Fish tells her story-that of a middle-aged woman-sometimes drowns out her younger self's voice with knowing observations. Still, Tracy gracefully encompasses teen insecurities, self-consciousness and longings-and beautifully expresses the enduring power of first love. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. From School Library Journal YA?Set in the '50s, this coming-of-age story concerns Louise Fisher, a day student at Canterbury Academy. Fish, as she is called, enjoys the company of two close girlfriends, several "cowboys," and a special young man named Dwight Brown. She expresses her passion for him by writing (in secret) a powerful love novel reflecting what she knows and what she only imagines. Her goal is to emerge as a writer of renown before she is 20. Understatement is the charm of this novel about the earnestness of teenage ardor and the self-consciousness of courtship. Readers don't expect a tragedy to happen: Dwight is killed in an automobile accident. His loss, felt by the whole circle of friends, causes Fish to throw herself into writing down every memory she has of him, committing them to memory, and burning them. Then life goes on, as it would for any teen, and Louise Fisher emerges a little older, a little wiser.?Ginny Ryder, Lee High School, Springfield, VACopyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.