This week’s SYNC books feature two boys and their different roads to manhood with some rough patches along the way. As usual, one is fiction and the other is nonfiction.
The first book is 100 Sideways Miles written by Andrew Smith and read by Kirby Heybourne. It features sixteen year old Finn Easton. Finn Easton sees the world through miles instead of minutes. It’s how he makes sense of the world, and how he tries to convince himself that he’s a real boy and not just a character in his father’s bestselling cult-classic book. Finn has two things going for him: his best friend, the possibly-insane-but-definitely-excellent Cade Hernandez, and Julia Bishop, the first girl he’s ever loved. Then Julia moves away, and Finn is heartbroken. Feeling restless and trapped in the book, Finn embarks on a road trip with Cade to visit their college of choice in Oklahoma. When an unexpected accident happens and the boys become unlikely heroes, they take an eye-opening detour away from everything they thought they had planned—and learn how to write their own destiny. The library owns the book and the audiobook in addition to the SYNC option.
The second book this week is This Boy’s Life written by Tobias Wolff and read by Oliver Wyman. This book is the author’s memoir which was originally published in 1989. This launched a whole memoir craze in the publishing world and was then made into a movie in 1993. The story is pretty grim: Teenage Tobias Wolff moves with his divorced mother from Florida to Utah to Washington State to escape her violent boyfriend. When she remarries, Wolff finds himself in a bitter battle of wills with his abusive stepfather, a contest in which the two prove to be more evenly matched than might have been supposed. Deception, disguise, and illusion are the weapons the young man learns to employ as he grows up—not bad training for a writer-to-be. Somber though this tale of family strife is, it is also darkly funny and so artistically satisfying that listeners come away exhilarated. Unfortunately, the Algonquin Area Public Library District does not own this book, however you can always place the book or the audiobook on hold and have it sent here from another library.