"This place and I do not get along," says 12-year-old army brat Katie, the narrator of Berg's (Talk Before Sleep) painfully accurate tale of first love in the days of princess phones and circle pins. After moving to Missouri from Texas with her stern father (her beloved mother is dead), bright, sensitive Katie has trouble fitting in. The few friends she does make include an antisocial rich girl and a beautiful shoplifter, fellow outsiders who can't quite quench her loneliness. Far more satisfying is the companionship she finds in Jimmy, a 23-year-old married gas station manager with a heart of gold. As Katie is enveloped by her yearning for Jimmy, her romantic preadolescent fantasies convey all the hope and exquisite vulnerability of first love. Katie's matter-of-fact narration is wonderfully touching, escorting the reader into a world where young girls treat the dos and don'ts of Glamour magazine with the hushed respect due the Ten Commandments. Whether chronicling the fun way to bake peanut butter cookies or her heroine's budding passion for literature, Berg sensitively mines the loneliness and bewilderment inherent in being young, insecure and desperate for connection. As she has demonstrated in previous books, Berg can conjure character with a minimum of words and a rainbow of nuance. The reader misses Katie the instant the book ends. Major ad/promo; author tour. (Apr.)
Joy School
Narrated by Natalie Ross
Elizabeth BergUnabridged — 5 hours, 28 minutes
Joy School
Narrated by Natalie Ross
Elizabeth BergUnabridged — 5 hours, 28 minutes
Overview
Winner of the New England Book Award for Fiction
Katie, the narrator, has relocated to Missouri with her distant, occasionally abusive father, and she feels very much alone: her much-loved mother is dead; her new school is unaccepting of her; and her only friends fall far short of being ideal companions. When she accidentally falls through the ice while skating, she meets Jimmy. He is handsome, far older than she, and married, but she is entranced. As their relationship unfolds, so too does Katie's awareness of the pain and intensity first love can bring.
Beautifully written in Berg's irresistible voice, Joy School portrays the soaring happiness of real love, the deep despair one can feel when it goes unrequited, and the stubbornness of hope that will not let us let go. Here also is recognition that love can come in many forms and offer many different things. Joy School illuminates, too, how the things that hurt the most can sometimes teach us the lessons that really matter.
About Durable Goods, Elizabeth Berg's first novel, Andre Dubus said, "Elizabeth Berg writes with humor and a big heart about resilience, loneliness, love and hope. And the transcendence that redeems." The same will be said of Joy School, Elizabeth Berg's most luminous novel to date.
“[A] painfully accurate tale of first love... Berg can conjure character with a minimum of words and a rainbow of nuance. The reader misses Katie as soon as the book ends.” -Publishers Weekly, starred review
Editorial Reviews
For Katie, being 13 is hard: she's still a child, but she thinks she's a woman-maybe. It's harder still because her mother is dead and her army colonel dad has moved her to a new town. At first, Katie makes no friends. Then she meets Jimmy and falls in love. She is sure that Jimmy returns her love and that they will have a life together. (So what if he's married and has a child?) Katie's first friends are Cynthia, a lonely girl with a too-perfect mother and an old, very Italian grandmother, and Taylor, a model who introduces her to boys, stealing, and sex. The characters in this novel are so real, so perfectly drawn, that readers will become 13 again, if only for a short while. A beautiful almost-coming-of-age novel about a memorable young woman from the author of Talk Before Sleep (LJ 3/15/94); for most fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/96.]-Barbara Maslekoff, Ohioana Lib., Columbus, Ohio
A 13-year-old girl falls in love with a 21-year-old garage mechanic who saves her life. From this unrequited love and other sorrows, she learns about the joys of life. (July)
Hilarious and heartbreaking...A book worth buying. -- The San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle
If books were food, Berg's latest (The Pull of the Moon, 1996; Range of Motion, 1995; etc.) might be a Twinkie: the sweet tale of a precocious 13-year-old girl who falls in love with—and loses—an older man.
Katie has had some hard knocks lately: Her mother recently died; her older sister Diane has gone off (pregnant) to Mexico to marry Dickie; and Katie has had to move from Texas to Missouri, where not only does she know nobody, but the two kids across the street are incorrigibly mean. Things quickly start looking rosier, though, as Ginger, the nice young woman who housekeeps for Katie and her dad, starts thinking that dad is more than just nice—even if he hardly ever smiles, which is only because he's an Army colonel. At school, Katie befriends the glamorous Taylor Sinn (a model), who turns out to be too fast with boys (Katie hates that) and a shoplifter. Katie has better luck with wallflower Cynthia O'Connell, who's slow at the start but steadily gains in true depth—and who has a colorful Italian grandmother who's dying slowly but just loves Katie. The big test, though, is when Katie falls in love with Jimmy, the handsome, sensitive—and married—Mobile station attendant ten years her senior who gives her a change of clothes after an ice-skating accident. There's real affection between the two, but the actual love is one-sided, and when Katie at last finds this out she's demolished enough to decide "Well, I do not need love, I am just going to be a poet." Good enough, but if Katie still says of Taylor's artist mother that she "does gigantic paintings that you don't know what is," she may have to improve her language skills until she's at least 14.
A pleasant between-meals snack of the kids-are-great genre: teary, funny, Hallmarkian wise, its true space waiting among the YAs.
Hilarious and heartbreaking . . . A book worth buying.”
—San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle
“IF YOU ONLY READ ONE BOOK THIS YEAR, LET IT BE THIS ONE.”
—Richmond Times Dispatch
“A STORY THAT TUGS AT THE HEARTSTRINGS. . . Thirteen-year-old Katie is new to her Missouri town, living alone with a stern, inaccessible father following her mother’s death. Unable to fit in at school, she forges alliances where she can: with her housekeeper, with a pimply fellow misfit named Cynthia, and with the gorgeous Taylor, who gets her kicks out of shoplifting. Most frustrating of all is Katie’s imperfect friendship with the proprietor of a local gas station, a handsome twenty-three-year-old who shares her love of checkers but doesn’t return her crush. With humor and an eye for telling detail, Berg conveys the way each unpromising element of Katie’s life ultimately offers her more than she had anticipated.”
—People
“[A] PAINFULLY ACCURATE TALE OF FIRST LOVE . . . Berg can conjure character with a minimum of words and a rainbow of nuance. The reader misses Katie the instant the book ends.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A FUNNY, SWEET, COMING-OF-AGE NARRATIVE . . .
Its heart and wit will remind Berg’s fans why her writing is so eminently likable.”
—Chicago Tribune
“If you remember the heart-slamming intensity of your own first love, Joy School will recall the pain and exhilaration that intersect when that love is unrequited. Berg’s peripheral characters are a treat: Vivid and quirky, they do more than fill in the background. These are people who encourage the reader to imagine what their own stories would be.”
—St. Louis Post–Dispatch
“Growing up is hurtful, humorous, petty, and very, very serious. Berg has beautifully wrought this stage of life in her witty, warm way. Like every other Berg novel, Joy School is a joy to read.”
—The Orlando Sentinel
“Berg’s style works beautifully—deceptively simple, conversational, and hip.”
—USA Today
“Dreamy and fragile, Berg’s heroine is so convincingly brought to life that we feel her joys and sorrows as though they were our own.”
—The Baltimore Sun
“Berg is a wily writer who has no trouble whipping up something sweet and satisfying. . . . [Joy School] will touch the most sophisticated reader’s heart.”
—Houston Chronicle
“One of the best things about this wonderful book is how funny it is. Don’t read it anywhere you’re not willing to risk being caught laughing aloud.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“A coming-of-age story that is neither grim nor saccharine, an exploration of how, for one spirited girl, life brings both daily grief and daily joy . . . Joy School possesses many of the strengths of [Durable Goods], most notably the narrator’s voice. Katie is funny, imaginative, irreverent, idiosyncratic, and deeply, unusually charming.”
—The Boston Sunday Globe
“A sweet-sad initiation story told in Berg’s compelling voice.”
—Newark Star-Ledger
“The reader feels tenderness toward the child’s hope and toughness, and recognizes wisdom in her guileless voice. . . . Berg captures particularly well the feeling of loneliness and the sadness of growth and change.”
—The Dallas Morning News
“Wonderful . . . Another must for Elizabeth Berg fans . . . Once you develop a taste for what she does with language and deeply rooted emotions, you devour [her books]. They are as a woman thinketh and feeleth and liveth in this whirling world where you only rarely stop to smell the rain-wet lilacs.”
—News & Record (Greensboro, NC)
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940172378980 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Brilliance Audio |
| Publication date: | 12/03/2013 |
| Series: | Katie Nash , #2 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
Mrs. Brady calls on me when no one else gets it, even if my hand is not up. This is how I know that in a way I am her pet. I think in a tidy corner of her brain she keeps the thought, Well, I can always count on Katie. And she is right. There is nothing in English so far that I don't like, even the sonnets that I have never heard of anyone else liking except English teachers. I excel in English, I always have. Not the grammar part, but getting what the author means. Interpretation, they call it. I think it's why I got to skip grade four.
After English comes the opposite: Math. Harry Hadd is the teacher, if you can imagine such a name. He wears a wrinkly white shirt and no tie and some pants that look like one little breeze through the window and they'll fall down. His shoes are black high-top sneakers, except for a day when the principal came to watch the class. Then he wore brown tie shoes all shined up fake. He keeps his sleeves rolled up and it is a mystery to him why every kid in class does not understand everything in the book from day one. He says things like that all the time, "day one." He calls us by our last names, too, "Miss Woodward," "Mr. Evans." This makes us all feel worse. They have tracks here in this school, and I believe I am in the dumbest class for math. It's supposed to be a big secret, but give me a break. Everybody knows. In English I'm in with the smart kids. They mostly have all their classes together. I only do well in English. In other subjects I am normal except in math where I am dismal. In those
achievement tests you have to take, my line for math goes so far down, way below the red line they draw in that says you should at least be here.I just don't get math. Even if I go for extra help, one on one, I don't get it. I went for a lot of extra help in another school, where I had a teacher who was so nice, Mr. Dieter. He was a real ugly man married to such a pretty woman, which always made me in a good mood. He would explain and explain and explain and it was like my brain was closed for business. Finally, I would just feel so sorry for him I would say, Oh! I get it! but I never did. And he would hand me back my D- test with a small red note, "Katie--what happened? See me."
Third period, gym. If I were to make up a torture for someone, it would be you have to have gym right in the middle of your day. Your body is not in the mood for gym in the middle of the day. You have done some work to try to look all right for the day, you have slept on rollers and stood in front of your mirror for a long while that morning and all that, and then splat, gym. You have to run around and get messed up and then you have to take a shower and even if you cheat and just stand in front of it with your towel on, your underwear hidden beneath, the steam still gets you. And changing in front of everyone. And smelling that rubbery smell mixed with BO. Plus the teacher, as usual, is a mean woman. Every gym teacher I've every had has been mean, like she has a problem she is going to punish all of us for out on the courts. This gym teacher is named Miss Sweet. That would be what they call irony, I'll tell you that. Even though she is called Miss Sweat behind her back. She has little lips, which
you think the body forgot to send the bloodline to; they are pale and straight. She wears gym shorts and a sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up and severe socks and sneakers. They're the same gym shorts we wear, but on her they look different. She has a whistle around her neck, and her hair is pulled back into a ponytail although it's not long enough for one. It's like she's so strict even her hair cannot be loose. She carries around a clipboard to write mean things down about you, and once when I failed to clear the bar for the high jump, she hit me on the butt with it. It was because in her opinion I should have been able to do it. I tried again, failed again, but she didn't hit me again because I wasn't worth it. If I ever get to be God, I'm calling all the gym teachers in the world into one room to say this: All right, knock it off!! And then I'm going to make them all change into pink formals with pink satin heels. If I were to draw on a paper what gym does for me, I would make one dot. And
then I would erase it. But I have to do it, every day, in the middle of the day, right before lunch.
Which is another thing.
It is hard enough to do lunch when you know a place. But when you are new, you have never seen anything so big as the lunchroom. There are secret maps, and you'd better not mess up. Which I did, of course. The first day, I sat at the popular table. As if I should know. First one perfect girl sat down, then another. They were making big eyes at one another, rattling their bracelets around, but nobody said anything. They just sat around me like white surrounding black until I got it. I said, "Excuse me," and moved, and they all laughed together. It was kind of a pretty sound.
I sit mostly by myself, or by someone miscellaneous. I don't talk. At first I tried, but nothing good ever came of it. I would see the person I'd talked to in the hall the next day and say hi and they would look at me like, What? So I just eat and that is the one good thing about this school, they have very good food. On Sloppy Joe day, I go back for seconds. I get them, too. The cafeteria ladies like me. They see what goes on. Kids think they stand back there with their big metal spoons and big aprons and just think, Oh I see the corn has gone down, I guess I'll go on back and get some more. But when you look up you see that of course all the faces are different. And they are interested in you and friendly and a lot of them really care that you eat well. And they feel happy when you like things. They don't usually give seconds, especially not to the boys, who are not sincere when they ask, who just want to use seconds for food fights. But they will give more to me. This is how far
things have gone down, that my only friends in school are the cafeteria ladies. And not even really. They take breaks together, they sit at a table in the corner with some coffee and a little of this and a little of that, things we had for lunch. If I went up and sat with them, they would like it either. I think in about a few months I will be sitting with someone real. It's hard to tell. I have never had such a hard time getting my place in a school. You wish you could bring a book of directions to yourself that everyone would read. But no. You just have to wait until the time that a crack comes.
After lunch is history. This man who teaches it, Mr. Spurlock, is insane. Here is his idea of how to teach: Copy notes that you have written in your bent-up spiral notebook onto the blackboard. Tell the class to shut up about two hundred times. Write small and creepy so nobody can read it. Then tell your class to copy the notes from the board into their notebooks. While they do, sit at your desk and read the newspaper and pick at your side teeth with your little finger. Just before the bell rings, say, "Any questions?" I swear this is exactly true. Not one kid likes him. Plus his shoes are about five hundred years old. If he were mental, which his shoes look like, you would feel sorry for him. But he is not mental. He is just the worst teacher of all time in the history of the whole universe. Probably he is a made-up thing from a science experiment to find out: How much can kids take?
Next, French, and the teacher is so beautiful she could be Miss America. She wears French things like a scarf around her neck. She wears short-sleeved sweaters and long tight skirts and nice leather shoes that tie. She smells like good perfume. But her problem is that she never speaks English to us and sometimes we just need to know something. It is only beginning French. So what I want to know is where does she get off from the first day rattling on in French, French, French? One day I tried to complain. After class. I said, "Miss Worthington, I don't think you should talk only in French." And she said, "Ah, ah, ah! En français!! " You feel wound-up frustrated in there. But here is the most surprising thing: I am learning French. Last Saturday, when the mailman came, I said, "Voici le facteur! " My father asked me What did I say and I said That was French for Here's the mailman, and he said Is that right? So at home I am glad I have her. But in class it is a tor
ture. Sometimes in class I see that my heel is jiggling bad.
Last in the day is home ec. Here is where they teach you how to make food you never want to eat and how to make clothes you never want to wear. Our menu for Fall Festival will be pork-sausage casserole. It has sweet potatoes and apples in it. The teacher's name is Miss Woods and every time I see her I think about a woman who got colored wrong in the coloring book. She has really red hair, from a box, anyone can see. She wears way too much blusher and blue eye shadow. My best friend Cherylanne lives in Texas, where I just moved from last summer, and she knows everything about makeup. But I know she would throw up her hands in despair if she was told to fix this woman. Miss Woods talks in a high, excited voice and she hardly ever shuts up. I guess one good thing I could say about her is she is always in a good mood. We're going to make aprons next week out of dishcloths.
And that's school, except for the bus ride and homeroom. Homeroom is where they vote for people to be things and where the crabby teacher takes attendance. Every day, she looks like she has just been in a fight. And we are supposed to go to her with problems. She is our advisor. Here is her advice: Don't bug me. And the bus ride? Imagine you are alone on a bumpy vehicle that smells like baloney and takes ten hours to go one block. That is it.
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