Synopses & Reviews
For many college students, Spring Break means fun and sun in Florida. For Danny, a Yale junior, it means two weeks behind the wheel of the Roach Coach, his father's lunch truck, which plies the parking lots of office parks in central New Jersey.
But Danny can use the time behind the coffee urn to try and make sense of a love life that's gotten a little complicated. There's loyal and patient hometown honey Cindy and her recently dropped bombshell to contend with. And there's also lissome Polly back in New Haven--with her shifting moods, perfect thrift store dresses and inconvenient liaison with a dashing professor.
If girl problems aren't enough, there's the constant menace of the Lunch Monsters, a group of thugs who think Danny has planted the Roach Coach in their territory.
Joe College is Tom Perrotta's warmest and funniest fiction yet, a comic journey into the dark side of love, higher education and food service.
Review
"Tom Perrotta is like an American Nick Hornby: companionable and humane, lighthearted and surprisingly touching...Perrotta has established a slightly befogged comic landscape that's his alone. Fans of such quirky indie films as "Chasing Amy" and "Dazed and Confused" should feel right at home." (Newsweek)
Review
"Perrotta has a knack for revealing the huge stakes in ordinary events..he's created an absorbing, fleshed-out portrait of an American male edging toward adulthood.... His prose is cheerful and smooth...full of funny, dead-on observations." (The New York Times Book Review)
Review
"Yale junior Danny is the winning narrator of Perrotta's fourth book...the resulting portrait is of a picaresque hero who is not just charming but charmed...The novel's appeal is in its idiosyncrasies...Perrotta is in full control of his quirky comic sensibility." (Publisher's Weekly)
Review
"An antic novel of academia and the middle class...Perrotta's forte is balancing the seriousness of Danny's emotional dilemma with comic barbs hurled at academic chicanery." (USA Today)
Review
"An overwhelmingly pleasing book"--
The New York Times "An absorbing, fleshed-out portrait of an American male edging toward adulthood by crossing seemingly rigid social boundaries."--
The New York Times Book Review
"Companionable and humane, lighthearted and surprisingly touching."--Newsweek
“Perrotta transforms eighties nostalgia into art.”—Entertainment Weekly
Review
"Tom Perrotta...is like an American Nick Hornby: companionable and humane, lighthearted and surprisingly touching." --
Newsweek"An absorbing, fleshed-out portrait of an American male edging toward adulthood by crossing seemingly rigid social boundaries." --The New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
For Danny, a Yale junior and the sympathetic everyman hero of this new novel, Spring Break means two weeks behind the wheel of the Roach Coach, his father's lunch truck. Danny uses the time to make sense of his love life, which gets pretty complicated.
Synopsis
Populated by a vividly drawn cast of characters -- Yale students and lunch truck drivers alike -- JOE COLLEGE evokes two radically different worlds through Tom Perrotta's distinctive combination of humor, sweetness, and telling detail. JOE COLLEGE is a serious comic novel about love, higher education, and food service, a uniquely American story about the mistakes we sometimes make and the illusions we have to shed on the way to finding our place in the world.
Synopsis
For many college students, Spring Break means fun and sun in Florida. For Danny, a Yale junior, it means two weeks behind the wheel of the Roach Coach, his father's lunch truck, which plies the parking lots of office parks in central New Jersey.
But Danny can use the time behind the coffee urn to try and make sense of a love life that's gotten a little complicated. There's loyal and patient hometown honey Cindy and her recently dropped bombshell to contend with. And there's also lissome Polly back in New Haven--with her shifting moods, perfect thrift store dresses and inconvenient liaison with a dashing professor.
If girl problems aren't enough, there's the constant menace of the Lunch Monsters, a group of thugs who think Danny has planted the Roach Coach in their territory.
Joe College is Tom Perrotta's warmest and funniest fiction yet, a comic journey into the dark side of love, higher education and food service.
About the Author
Tom Perrotta is the author of Election, The Wishbones and Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies. Election was made into the acclaimed 1999 movie starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon, and The Wishbones is slated for a feature film from New Line. Perrotta teaches writing at Harvard, lives in Watertown, Massachusetts and is a 1983 graduate of Yale.