Bluesman
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
It is the summer of 1967 and, with one more year of high school to go, Leo Suther still has a lot to learn. He's in love with Allie Donovan, the beautiful girl who has turned his head ever since she moved to his small Massachusetts town. And he feels a real draw to the blues his father has taught him. Leo soon finds himself in the middle of a consuming love affair - and an intense testing of his political values by Allie's father, who challenges him on the escalating Vietnam conflict and forces him to examine just where he stands in relation to the people in his life. Throughout his - and the nation's - unforgettable 'summer of love', Leo is learning the language of the blues, which seem to echo the mourning he feels for his dead mother, his occasionally distant father, and the youth that is fast giving way to manhood.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a gentle and winning first novel by the author of The Cage Keeper and Other Stories , 17-year-old Leo Suther faces some difficult growing up in the summer of 1967. Leo lives in a small Massachusetts town in the Connecticut River Valley with Jim, his father. This summer, he will learn to play blues harmonica from Jim's best friend, Ryder, and will win and then lose the daughter of a self-proclaimed communist who is, to complicate matters, his boss on a construction crew. Against the distant rumbles of the Vietnam War, Leo comes of age, discovers his late mother's inner life through her diaries, suffers ups and downs in his sometimes confused love for girlfriend Allie and impulsively rushes into a series of dangerous decisions, culminating in his enlistment in the Army. The author makes all these developments entirely believable, and Leo's sometimes rocky but deeply loving relationship with Jim is affecting as well. Like his well-known father of the same name, Dubus is a sympathetic and compassionate chronicler of ordinary lives. He understands the rhythms of hard labor and the needs of the people who do it; the sensitivity and decency of his working-class heroes make them genuinely compelling and likable.
