Synopses & Reviews
Tony Earley gives us a luminous portrait of a ten-year-old boy growing up in the Depression-era town of Aliceville, North Carolina:
"As the sun began to set, Jim and the uncles watched the last yellow light of the day slide up the mountain toward the bald, dragging evening behind it. When the light went out of their faces, they turned and watched it retreat up the peak, where at the summit a single tree flared defiantly before going dark. A chilly breeze whipped from nowhere across the bald and flapped the legs of Jim's overalls. He turned with the uncles for a last look at the view before heading down the mountain. All but the brightest greens had drained out of the world, leaving in their stead an array of somber blues. A low fog had begun to seep out between the trees along Painter Creek. Jim jumped down from the rock and looked again toward home."
At once delightful and wise, Jim the Boy brilliantly captures the pleasures and fears of youth at a time when America itself was young and struggling to come into its own.
Review
"Tony Earley has a wonderful gift for deep observation, exact and wise and often funny." New York Times Book Review
Review
"Childhood innocence doesn't crop up much these days in serious fiction....Tony Earley's first novel, Jim the Boy, blithely and successfully counters this trend." Time
Review
"What Tony Earley's offers in Jim the Boy is not a feast but something perhaps much rarer, something akin to the perfect meal: rich and satisfying, but wholesome just the same." Chicago Tribune
Review
"[W]hen I find a good book, I get up (literally) and dance around the living room. Tony Earley's Jim the Boy made me dance....For a brief time, this modest little masterpiece of a book may make you feel like flying." Seattle Times
Review
"[A] dazzling first novel about boyhood...deceptively quiet, beautifully wrought evocation of childhood." Newsweek
Synopsis
Both delightful and wise, Jim the Boy brilliantly captures the pleasures and fears of youth at a time when America itself was young and struggling to come into its own.
About the Author
Tony Earley is the author of Jim the Boy, Here We Are in Paradise, and Somehow Form a Family. He lives with his family in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is the Samuel Milton Fleming Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.