Inexcusable
by Chris Lynch
from Simon Pulse
"I am a good guy. Good guys don't do bad things. Good guys understand that no means no, and so I could not have done this because I understand."
Keir Sarafian knows many things about himself. He is a talented footballplayer, a loyal friend, a devoted son and brother. Most of all, he is agood guy.
And yet the love of his life thinks otherwise. Gigi says Keir has donesomething awful. Something unforgivable.
Keir doesn't understand. He loves Gigi. He would never do anything tohurt her. So Keir carefully recounts the events leading up to that onefateful night, in order to uncover the truth. Clearly, there has been amistake.
But what has happened is, indeed, something inexcusable.
Gold Dust
by Chris Lynch
from HarperTrophy
"'Don't make things more complicated than they should be' would be my philosophy if I had one." The year is 1975 and that's single-minded Richard Riley Moncrief talking, a Boston seventh grader too focused on his one true love--baseball, especially the Red Sox--to even contemplate that anything else in the universe might have significance. That endearing, maniacal obsession equips Richard with all the philosophy and metaphor he needs to navigate the insular world of St. Colmcille's parochial school, his working-class neighborhood, and all the baseball-related holy sites (the Northeastern U. batting cages, Fenway Park) in between. That is, until busing begins in Boston, racial tensions rise, and a polished, young Dominican émigré named Napoleon Charlie Ellis (who happens to be a bang-up cricket player) enrolls at St. Colmcille's.
The other major event in Richard's life is the arrival of touted rookies Fred Lynn and Jim Rice--the Gold Dust Twins--to the Sox roster. Not long after the two boys find themselves magnetically drawn together, Richard cooks up a new obsession: he will reform this cricket player, and the two of them will fulfill their destiny as the next Gold Dust Twins.
Chris Lynch's convincing sensitivity to a difficult age and topic--along with his clear love of the game--combine to make Gold Dust simply superb, a touching, subtle, and insightful book that comes across as clean as the crack of a bat. (Ages 9 to 12) --Paul Hughes
If I ran things,. nobody would have names.
We would just have batting averages.
When star rookies Fred Lynn and Jim Rice, the Gold Dust Twins, join the Red Sox in 1975, Richard dreams of following in their footsteps.
Napoleon Charlie Ellis arrives in Boston from the island of Dominica with a firm handshake, a love of cricket and classical music, and no one to call a friend. He needs help. Richard plans to help Napoleon and make him his partner. The two of them will go on to baseball greatness together, the next Gold Dust Twins.
Except what if Napoleon has dreams of his own?
2001 Notable Children's Books (ALA), 2001 Best Books for Young Adults (ALA), Children's Books 2000-NY Public Lib., and Bulletin Blue Ribbon Best of 2000 Award
Slot Machine
by Chris Lynch
from HarperTeen
This darkly funny look at growing up male in America is narrated by chubby, 14-year-old Elvin Bishop, who describes, with sublime sarcasm, his increasingly painful efforts to find his appropriate athletic "slot." Mature readers will find this unusual sports story both hilarious and poignant; in a starred review, Booklist wrote, "this wry, thoughtful book speaks with wisdom and heart to the victim and the outsider in us all." An ALA Best Book for Young Adults.
"If you don't have a slot, what are we going to do with you?"
It's called Twenty-One Nights with the Knights. But for Elvin Bishop--fourteen, overweight, and a self-proclaimed nonathlete--this summer sports "retreat" is more like the twenty-one trials of hell.
As everyone around him, including his best friends, slips smoothly into athletic "slots," Elvin is pounded on the football field, slammed on the baseball diamond, and tortured on the wrestling mat--always coming out a complete failure. But appearances can be deceiving. Sometimes real strength comes from breaking the rules rather than playing the game. And sometimes finding acceptance is less about fitting in than about making your own way--with grit and humor.
All incoming freshmen at Flagship Academy's summer program are suppose to find an athletic `slot' for themselves. But there is no slot for Elvin, a wise-cracking, overweight sports incompetent who bounces from one humiliating game to another. How he discovers his own place for himself—with grit and humor—makes for "a funny, poignant coming-of-age story...[A] wry, thoughtful book [that] speaks with wisdom and heart to the victim and outsider in us all."—BL.
1996 Best Books for Young Adults (ALA)
1996 Best Books for Reluctant Young Adult Readers (ALA)
Books for Youth Editors' Choices 1995 (BL)
1996 Books for the Teen Age (NY Public Library)
Young Adult Choices for 1997 (IRA/CBC)
Extreme Elvin
by Chris Lynch
from HarperTeen
Look out world, Elvin Bishop is back, and he's better--if a little less bigger--than ever. Author Chris Lynch's overweight antihero has slimmed down a bit since his debut in Slot Machine, and has moved from the frying pan of sports camp into the fires of high school. With the help of his two best friends, Frankie and Mike, Elvin prepares to conquer the hormone-drenched horrors of ninth grade. Almost immediately he finds himself dealing with a bad case of hemorrhoids ("No, it doesn't hurt much... run and find me a tree branch that's on fire and I'll show ya"), surviving a traumatizing trip to the Big & Tall men's store, and suffering a close encounter of the heartbreaking kind. But when the going gets tough, at least Elvin knows he can depend on his offbeat mom to empathize--even though her loving advice is often given with more than a few grains of sarcasm.
With this second Elvin tale, Lynch has once again hit the funny bone on the head. Teens (if they can stop giggling long enough) will appreciate his graceful way of making adolescent pain evoke sympathetic chuckles. His hilarious portrayal of the nightmare that is young adulthood ("Young adult. You know that one was dreamed up by an old adult") makes clear that rather than poking fun at teens' woes, Lynch is laughing right alongside them. (Ages 12 to 15) --Jennifer Hubert
I used to have a mother, and a friend, and anotherfriend. Now I got relationships.
Elvin Bishop is fourteen--an official Young Adult. Having barely survived the sports camp that he and his best friends, Frankie and Mikie, attended in SLOT MACHINE, Elvin is actually ready for high school to begin. Or so he thinks.
Suddenly, he's hurled into a whole now social scene, where relationships-the right relationships--are the name of the game. Leave it to Elvin to fall for exactly the wrong kind of girl--the kind of girl who is definitely not a part of any guy's cool plan. And that's just the beginning of his problems. With an appetite that forces him to shop at the Big and Tall, a mother who still talks to her long-dead husband, and a nasty case of hemorrhoids, is becoming cool something that Elvin can even pull off?
00-01 Tayshas High School Reading List
Freewill
by Chris Lynch
from HarperTeen
Chris Lynch has long been one of the most stylistically daring of teen novelists, and in Freewill, his innovative use of language redefines the possibilities of the genre. Strikingly, the story is told in second person. The voice is in the mind of Will, a boy who is moving in stunned bewilderment through a life leeched of meaning by the death of his father and stepmother in what may have been a suicide and murder. This speaker (who is not Will) constantly admonishes, challenges, and questions reality in clipped, enigmatic sentence fragments, and Will only occasionally answers back. The events of the story are dimly seen through this distorting haze of interior dialogue (as the events of Lynch's Gold Dust were seen through the protagonist's obsession with baseball).
Will, in a therapeutic woodworking class at "Hopeless High," has moved beyond furniture and garden gnomes to strange pole sculptures. There he is disconnected from reality and other people, except for occasional brief encounters with a tall black runner named Angela, who remains sarcastic and deliberately distant. When a girl from the school drowns in what is perhaps a suicide, a floral tribute accumulates around the death spot, with one of Will's sculptures as the centerpiece. A second possible suicide, and then two more are all marked with the strange poles, and a cult begins to grow around Will as the "carrier pigeon of death." A reporter forces him to see the connection between the sculptures and his father's ambivalent end, and Will begins to sink into total oblivion, saved, finally, when Angela and his grandparents reach out in "freewill," in this very dark, very odd, but riveting novel. (Ages 14 and older) --Patty Campbell
Why are you here? Will was destined to be a pilot, to skim above surfaces. So why is he in wood shop class? He doesn't know -- or maybe he just doesn't want to admit the truth.
What do you know? When the local teens begin committing suicide, their deaths all have one thing in common: beautifully carved wooden tributes that appear just after or before their bodies are found.
What will you do? Will's afraid he knows who's responsible. And lurking just behind that knowledge is another secret, so explosive that he might not be able to face it and live....
Lynch on Lynch (Directors on Directors)
by David Lynch
from Faber & Faber
You know David Lynch as the director of terminally weird movies such as Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Wild at Heart, as well as the bizarre and highly influential television series Twin Peaks. But did you know that it was Mel Brooks who gave him his first big break? That the idea for Blue Velvet grew out of a fantasy Lynch had about sneaking into a private room and learning the secret to a murder mystery? That Twin Peaks came about because co-creator Mark Frost was obsessed with Marilyn Monroe?
In Lynch on Lynch, a 250-page interview book, editor Chris Rodley does a superb job of getting Lynch to talk at length about the high and low points of his life and career. Their conversation covers his early work as a painter through the making of his major films of the 1980s, the fiasco of Dune ("It is what it is."), and the recent and very obscure Lost Highway ("I just *loved* this title.").
Lynch is particularly interesting when he talks about the creative process: "I don't want to give the impression that I sit around thinking up horrible things. I get all kinds of different ideas and feelings. If I'm lucky, they start organizing themselves into a story--then maybe some ideas come along that are too eerie, too violent, or too funny, and they don't fit that story. So you write them down and save them for two or three projects down the road. There's nowhere you can't go in a film--if you think of it, you can go there." Lynch on Lynch is a treat for Lynch fans of all shapes, sizes, and fetishes.
The Gravedigger's Cottage
by Chris Lynch
Funny how much stuff
you can lose when you move.
The only thing you can't lose is yourself.
No matter how hard you try.
No matter where you go.
Lost:1 absentminded dog names Loose Lucy
2 inseparable duet-singing finches
1 seemingly indestructible tortoise
1 huggable hamster
(FRAGILE -- Please don't squeeze.)
1 lopsided, lop-eared rabbit
*1 sneaky little chameleon
(*Not really lost. We just can't see him.)
2 loving mothers
We miss them all very much.
-- Walter & Sylvia
P.S. Address all inquiries to W. & S. McLuckie at the Gravedigger's Cottage.
Iceman
by Chris Lynch
from HarperTeen
The other guys on Eric's hockey team call him the Iceman, because he's a heartless player, cold as ice. Only Eric knows the truth -- he's not cold, he's on fire, burning with a need he just can't explain. Least of all to his fanily -- not to his dad, whose only joy in life id watching Eric smash other hockey players to a pulp. Or his mom, who starts every conversation with "Your problem is..." Or even his brother, Duane, once a star athlete, now a star slacker.
Can Eric find a way to make them understand how he feels -- before the fire inside consumes him completely?
"At 14, Eric still loves his parents, but knows they are incapable of giving him the warmth and honest emotion he seeks. He slams out his anger and suffering in the hockey rink, where he's the Iceman, 'the animal,' so out of control even his own teammates shun him. Only time spent at the local mortuary—with the taciturn recluse who works there—gives him some measure of comfort. . . . Much better than the usual sports novel . . . a thought provoking book guaranteed to compel and touch a teenage audience."—BL. "Eric's narrative voice is clear and distinctive. . . . Iceman will leave readers smiling and feeling good." —SLJ. 1995 Best Books for Young Adults (ALA)
1995 Recommended Books for Reluctant Young Adult Readers (ALA)
1995 Books for the Teen Age (NY Public Library)
Books for Youth Editors' Choices 1994 (BL)
English Journal Young Adult Literature 1994 Honor List
All the Old Haunts
by Chris Lynch
from HarperTeen
Our lives are shaped by events from the moment we are born. Sometimes we are lucky...sometimes we are not. Almost always, we find a way to get by....
A kid visited by memories of his dead cousin and tortured by his decision not to take a leap. A twin tormented by his monstrous brother. A couple blown apart by an unintended pregnancy. A personal discovery that threatens disaster. A bitter anger whose object is beyond the reach of revenge. A longing to live a forbidden life.In a new collection of sharp, glittering short stories, award-winning author Chris Lynch gives us a candid and intense look at a collection of young lives from the inside out.Gypsy Davey
by Chris Lynch
from HarperTeen
Davey's had to grow up fast in order to get away--away from his beautiful mother, who loves him, but doesn't know how to take care of him; away from his charismatic but reckless father, who loves him too, but can't commit to anyone, least of all his family; and away from the people who look at him strangely because he's not like them. The only constant in his life has been his sister, Joanne, who's fed him, protected him, and taken care of him ever since she was seven and he was two.
Now Jo, still a teenager, has a baby herself, and it's Davey's turn to take care of someone. Someday soon, he knows, he'll find his own somebody who'll love him, and he'll have his own babies and he'll love them like nobody ever loved babies before.
Gritty, gripping, unflinchingly honest, Gypsy Davey is the extraordinary story of a boy's ultimate triumph as he comes of age.
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