A few of my favorite reads…
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All tagged coming of age
Tove Jansson (1914-2001) is perhaps the most famous Finnish writer and artist of the twentieth century, but it is worth noting, she was of the Swedish speaking minority. She is best known for her Moomintroll books of animated characters that continue to charm generations of readers. Jansson also wrote crisp, flowing prose. Her slender book, The Summer Book (originally published in 1978) is a beautiful story about life on a remote island in the Gulf of Finland during the summer months.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) by Ocean Vuong is a poetic, organic coming-of-age novel about a Vietnamese American child, Little Dog. Vuong crafts the novel as a letter of sorts that Little Dog writes to his illiterate mother. It is intimately personal, written in first person, as it bounces from point to point in the narrative of his childhood and adolescence.
There are many ways to tell a story and many ways to construct a hero. Amor Towles’s most recent novel The Lincoln Highway (2021) certainly plays with how a story might unfold and who readers identify as its star(s). His previous two novels focus on specific protagonists and take place over different time periods—Rules of Civility (2011) is an older woman’s retelling of one year in her life thirty years prior and A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) is one man’s story told chronologically over the course of thirty years. The Lincoln Highway takes an altogether different approach both in terms of characters and telling.
This winter I enjoyed all three of L. M. Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon books: Emily of New Moon (originally published 1923), Emily Climbs (1925), and Emily’s Quest (1927). Titular character and heroine, Emily Byrd Starr, feels the call to the creative life at a young age. There is a magic tug that draws her to put pen to page. As such, her story, told over the course of this trilogy, is very much a portrait of the artist as a young woman of sorts.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is the story of one girl’s coming of age in the 19teens. Set, as the title suggests, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the first two decades of the twentieth century, this rich novel focuses on the story of Francie Nolan. It is also, however, the story of her parents and their love, her aunts and grandmother, her neighborhood at large. Ultimately this moving coming-of-age novel explores the American promise that poor American kids, the grandkids of immigrants perhaps, might realize and the magic of that promise.
Set in the early twentieth-century English county side, Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, is the first-person journal of Cassandra Mortmain in year of her eighteenth birthday.
