Synopses & Reviews
The End of Youth is a collection of 13 linked stories, essays and rants, about carrying on after youth’s hope is gone. In "Afraid of the Dark," a child learns that there is good reason to be afraid. The adolescent narrator of "Description of a Struggle" finds that love can be brutal. "The Smokers" -examines an adult’s realization that longevity means seeing loved ones die. Written with the same spare and vivid beauty as her earlier award-winning works, The End of Youth is certain to win even wider acclaim.
Rebecca Brown is the author of The Terrible Girls, Annie Oakley’s Girl, The Gifts of the Body and The Dogs. She lives in Seattle.
Review
"Brown takes a step backward here with what feels like storytelling indecisiveness. As fiction, these pieces are missing something critical that's nevertheless hard to pinpoint like puzzle dioramas whose solution is to find what's wrong or missing in the picture. Still, the emotion here is real, if obscured and muted by a cloud of emotion." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"A strange and wonderful first-person voice emerges from the stories of Rebecca Brown, who strips her language of convention to lay bare the ferocious rituals of love and need." The New York Times Book Review
Review
"Rarer than the newness, the wit, the vivid readability, is the deep caring, understanding, the wholeness, the truth with which this astonishing, haunting writer creates her people." Tillie Olsen
Review
"Throughout her writing career, Brown has exhibited a rare sensitivity in
delving into difficult, uncomfortable material death, disease, imperfect
bodies and minds... in this slim book... there's also humor and sensuality
so intense it's visionary..." San Francisco Chronicle
Synopsis
Bittersweet tales about the loss of hope.
About the Author
Rebecca Brown is the author of The Terrible Girls, Annie Oakley's Girl, The Gifts of the Body, and The Dogs. She lives in Seattle.