Smart-alec urban nerd Ned Vizzini (author of It's Kind of a
Funny Story) wrote a lot of anecdotes about junior high and high school and got
them published while he was under 18. This collection of marvelously
self-deprecating pieces will feel familiar to anybody who has ever been a
teenager.
Vizzini was a nerdy Magic-playing teenager in New York City
in the 1990s, and wrote about it. A lot of those anecdotes got published, and
they’re all here, from the day he first played Nintendo in middle school to getting
into the best public school in NYC to coming home drunk for the very first time
to falling in love. The sum total of his anecdotes is a thoughtful and eloquent
memoir of an adolescence, told from the point of view of someone who was still
there at the time.
These are engaging little vignettes that show the author’s
progress from late childhood to late adolescence, somewhere between awkwardness
and grace. This is a young man who is privileged to be white and smart and
financially secure in a city where many teens are anything but; he’s well aware
of this. At the same time, he has faced social and emotional handicaps that form
the basis of his self-deprecating sense of humor. This is a very real account
of life in the big city for a teenager who may not be exactly typical but who
faces many of the same problems that other teens face.
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