Downers Grove - Softcover

Hornburg, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802137938 ISBN 13: 9780802137937

Publisher: Grove Press, 2001

Synopsis

Downers Grove is the haunting and tender story of Chrissie Swanson, a paranoid high school senior for whom graduating has become a matter of life or death. She's an unusual girl in an ordinary town. Her mother's sex life is overshadowing her own; her brother is aboard his own private Enterprise, slipping into one black hole after another; her best friend is hornier than a Prince song; leaving her eccentric grandmother as the only source of wisdom in a rapid downward spiral. As Chrissie tries to take control of the events that shape her life, she finds the events beginning to take control of her, until she is finally cornered by choices with everlasting consequences. Full of humor, wit, and the sacrilegious worldview of a savvy teenager, Downers Grove paints a searing portrait of the American dream in all its broken glory.

About this title

About the Author:

Michael Hornburg is the author of Bongwater, which was published in seven countries and made into an independent film. He lives in New York City, where he is currently working on the screenplay of Downers Grove for Miramax Films.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A highly polished, smoothly written second effort by Hornburg (Bongwater, 1995) with an affecting and naturally easy voicebut without much of a story to tell. The authors clearly tapped in, not only to the outlook and concerns of teenagers in general, but to the character who tells this story in particular. Chrissie Swanson, age 17, of Downers Grove, Illinoishis most successful creationnarrates in her entirely distinctive, smart, blithely ironic voice. Her brother, David, has retreated, semi-permanently, to the basement of the Swanson home, where he snorts heroin and plays gin rummy with his friends. Meanwhile, Chrissie's divorced mother has become seriously involved with a vaguely disturbing Christian used-car salesman and considers abandoning the family to marry her man. Faced with these uncertainties, Chrissie wanders through the last weeks of her senior year with Tracy, her best friend, and together they stumble into a party filled with strangers. Chrissie is nearly raped and ends up tossing a car battery through her attackers car, which sets off their novel-length, episodic quest for revenge. Just as quickly, Chrissie loses her heart to a distant, somehow vulnerable mechanic, 26-year-old Bobby, who races cars on the side. In the literal background, a petroleum fire in a nearby town burns across the final days of the story. Bobby, plumped to a romantic hero in Chrissie's eyes, rescues her from probable death at the hands of the menacing bullies, but when he invites her to leave town with him, she realizes his taste for danger predicts future unhappiness for them both. Advised by her eccentric and wise grandmother, Chrissie becomes a more mature, less jagged personality; the tale concludes when she takes a summer job at Dairy Queen. The story of Chrissie's life is a saga a magazine profile might strain to fill. Hornburg needs only something to say with his nearly faultless ear and delightful authorial voice. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0802137938
• ISBN 13: 9780802137937
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240