The One O'Clock Chop
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
It's the summer of 1973 and fourteen year old Matt spends his days working on a boat as a clam digger to earn extra money. His nights are another story—he spends time with his free-spirited cousin Jazzy who is visiting from Hawaii (and just happens to be beautiful). Matt can't deny that his affection for Jazzy moves beyond a crush, and everyone knows you can't fall in love with your cousin. Just when Matt decides to act on his feelings, Jazzy does something that changes everything between them.
Like the one o'clock chop—the strong breeze that blows across the Long Island Sound—Matt's summer proves to be as inevitable as a force of nature. Told with pitch-perfect angst and realism, Ralph Fletcher tells a gripping story of a teenager's life-altering summer.
"Writing with his customary sensitivity and flair for language, Fletcher turns a coming-of-age story into a rich, affecting read." - Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fletcher's (Marshfield Dreams) resonant novel vividly recreates its period setting, Long Island in 1973, and puts it to poetic use. Matt, the 14-year-old narrator, takes a job with Dan, a gruff yet kind clam digger, to earn money to buy a boat. On his first day, Matt witnesses the "One O'Clock Chop," which occurs daily when a breeze suddenly moves across the bay, "roughening up the smooth surface." Stirring up the seeming placidness of his existence, his beautiful, self-assured cousin Jazzy arrives from Hawaii to spend the summer with Matt and his mother (his father has moved away and remarried several years earlier). Though grappling with the fact of cousinhood, Matt gradually falls under Jazzy's spell. In one early, typically evocative scene, they listen to jazz and he hears the bass "like a big powerful heart, beating in the exact center of the music," and then Jazzy puts her arms around Matt: "I felt her arms around me, which was the last thing I expected. I felt her fingers moving up and down the middle of my back, as if my spine was one of the strings on a stand-up bass...." As the title implies, Matt will have his heart broken; he will also find his way toward repairing it. Writing with his customary sensitivity and flair for language, Fletcher turns a coming-of-age story into a rich, affecting read. Ages 10-16.