Jack (Vintage Contemporaries Series) » (1st Vintage contemporaries ed)

Salon wrote of the characters in A. M. Homes s 2002 story collection Things You Should Know, There are few formalities, even less bulls--t, no making nice for the sake of appearances. The same could be said for Homes s work as a whole. She specializes in bringing dark impulses and twisted tendencies to the surface, never softening or downplaying the often disturbing behavior displayed by her characters.

In Jack, A. M. Homes gives us a teenager who wants nothing more than to be normal—even if being normal means having divorced parents and a rather strange best friend. But when Jack’s father takes him out in a rowboat on Lake Watchmayoyo and tells his son he’s gay, nothing will ever be normal again. Out of Jack’s struggle to redefine what “family” means, A. M. Homes crafts a novel of enormous humor, charm, and resonance, the most convincing, funny, and insightful novel about adolescence since The Catcher in the Rye.

Crescent Dragonwagon

Ms. Homes handles the big subjects and adolescent passions subtly. . . even the minor characters have dimension and draw our sympathy. . . Without pat answers, A. M. Homes has given us a good youngster who in the end convincingly grows larger than his circumstances - as all of us, good and otherwise, must do on that arduous journey to adulthood. -- New York Times