Status
Available
Call number
Call number
F Col
Collection
Publication
Farrar Straus & Giroux (J) (1989), Edition: 1st, 216 pages
Description
"Show a little maturity," he said, which I've doped out to mean: Pass all your courses, avoid detection in all crimes and misdemeanors, don't get pregnant. Celine's father has left her with these instructions. She's not too worried about the last two, but she'll fail English unless she rewrites herCatcher in the Ryeessay. And she keeps being interrupted, especially by Jake, the neighbor's boy, who's been dumped on her for the weekend. An ALA Best Book for Young Adults ASchool Library JournalBest Book of the Year ABooklistBest Book of the '80s APublishers WeeklyBest Children's Book of the Year
Original publication date
1989
Similar in this library
User reviews
LibraryThing member kelpfactor
My favorite YA book. I just find the narration of the protagonist Celine very funny. Celine is a sixteen year old high school student living in Chicago with her young stepmother while her father is traveling on a lecture tour of Europe. She basically just wants to make it to the end of the school
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year so that she can then head to Europe herself and be free of high school and travel with her friend Sybil and get on with being an artist. However, things in her life kind of get turned upside down as the people around her suffer their own crises and Celine is required to be the responsible one. But Celine holds it together, as best she can, and that's the beauty of the book, I think. She takes care of a young neighbor boy whose parents are going through a divorce, and both his parents are so frazzled they flake out on their son. Celine's own friends flake out on her as well, and so the boy, Jake, and Celine hang out, watch t.v., and they make a connection, because both have kind of been let down by the central people in their lives. This isn't a book that tries to be hip or edgy like much teen literature, and that makes it all the more authentic. But it is funny, and I've always related to the book and the idea that you can only do what you can do. The book acknowledges its debt to The Catcher in the Rye early on. Spoiler: Celine doesn't get around to revising her Catcher essay during the course of the book. Maybe she does eventually, but in the grand scheme of things, an essay on The Catcher in the Rye isn't all that important. Everyone has their own life to live. Celine Monrieval is not Holden Caulfield. She thought Holden Caulfield was a whiny punk. I don't know how many high school English teachers have read Brock Cole's Celine, but more should: decent essay papers could be written about this book, in relation to The Catcher in the Rye, or not. Show Less
LibraryThing member RalphLagana
Celine is compared to Holden in Catcher in the Rye. Well, I never liked Catcher in the Rye and a comparable female protagonist didn't do anything to change my mind.
Pages
216