Jennies Boy, Wayne Johnston
Jennies Boy, Wayne Johnston
List: $26.00 | Sale: $18.20
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Jennie's Boy
A Misfit Childhood on an Island of Eccentrics

Author: Wayne Johnston

Narrator: Wayne Johnston

Unabridged: 8 hr 34 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Steerforth

Published: 02/07/2023


Synopsis

** Winner of the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour **

The sad, tender, and extremely funny memoir of a boyhood few thought he would survive, including the unforgettable mother and hilarious grandmother who raised him

A book to be relished by lovers of such works as The Glass Castle, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, and Angela's Ashes

Everything readers love about consummate storyteller and beloved bestselling novelist Wayne Johnston's work is on full display in Jennie’s Boy: incredible characters, brilliant language, and a deep sense of place.

Wayne Johnston’s family — his mother, father, and three brothers — were always on the move. The year he turned eight, the most memorable year of an unusual childhood, they found themselves occupying a wreck of a house in the community his mother Jennie was from: Goulds, Newfoundland was not so much a place as a scattering of homes along an unpaved road.

Everyone knew him as “Jennie’s boy,” and his tiny, ferocious mother felt judged for Wayne’s sickly, skinny condition — he had to spend much of his time in a bed on wheels that was moved from room to room. While his brothers went off to school, Wayne passed his days with his witty, eccentric maternal grandmother, Lucy, whose son Leonard had died at the age of seven and whose photo stood alongside a statue of the Blessed Virgin.

Jennie's Boy recalls a boyhood full of pain, laughter, tenderness, and the kind of wit for which Newfoundlanders are known. By that wit, and by their love for each other — so often expressed in the most unloving ways — he, and they, survived.

About The Author

Widely acclaimed for his magical weaving of fact and fiction, his masterful plotting and his gift for both description and character, Wayne Johnston's many novels include The Custodian of Paradise, The Navigator of New York and The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, which was a finalist for sixteen Canadian and international awards, including the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, and which won the New York Public Libraries Prize for Best Novel and was chosen by the Los Angeles Times as one of the Ten Best Books of the year. Baltimore's Mansion, a memoir about his father and grandfather, won the inaugural Charles Taylor Prize for literary nonfiction.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Krista on July 07, 2022

I was seven that November when we were tossed from our apartment in St. John’s. I had lived in twenty houses by then. I don’t remember a lot of them, but most of them were scattered along a couple of roads in a place called the Goulds, about an hour away from town. It wasn’t much of a place, not......more

Goodreads review by Wendy on February 21, 2025

Read for Canada Reads 2025 Bestselling novelist Wayne Johnston tells us the very sad story of his childhood in Newfoundland. He was a sickly boy surrounded by a dysfunctional family and an alcoholic father. Many have found humour in his story. I just felt heartache.......more

Goodreads review by George on October 24, 2024

This memoir is about six months in a boy's life, a fragment of his childhood, one fraught with his fragile physical health and precarious circumstances. Brilliantly written, but the book was too long and repetitive for something covering only six months. When the same argument his parents have is rep......more

Goodreads review by CATHERINE on January 07, 2023

So on the art is subjective, how boring it would be if we all liked the same things this book is a case in point. Why no-one just took this child to a doctor or reported the family to social services probably reflects them constantly moving around. This read as child abuse, telling a child they are......more

Goodreads review by Lindsey on January 09, 2025

It was a nice treat that while reading this memoir, I learned it was longlisted for 2025 Canada Reads. I’m already ahead of the curve! This book was heartfelt, raw and funny at times. More endearing than anything though, and I can’t recommend it enough......more


Quotes

**Winner of the Stephen Leacocock Memorial Award for Humor**
 
"While the book’s most apt comparison is likely Frank McCourt’s story of his Irish childhood in Limerick, “Angela’s Ashes,” “Jennie’s Boy” is, if anything, even more powerful: a compressed, restrained account of a life lived on the edge, not only in poverty, but at the cusp of mortality. A simple fishing trip, for example, becomes a near-tragic event, a life-shaping incident depicted with an emotional directness. Never overblown or sentimental, “Jennie’s Boy” is as vivid as one’s own memories, a glimpse into a past of pain and wonder, of loss and joy."Toronto Star

"Beautifully written, Jennie's Boy is an excellent example of narrative nonfiction that captures the reader's attention and doesn't let go until the book's apposite ending." — Booklist (starred review)

"Johnston recounts his childhood with affection and humor. Happily, and somewhat miraculously, he grew up to be a healthy adult. A tender memoir." — Kirkus Reviews

Jennie’s Boy is a warm memoir that recalls a childhood year filled with difficulties, but also a family’s love.” — Foreword Reviews

"All I have ever done," Wayne Johnston writes in Jennie's Boy, his account of growing up dirt-poor in Newfoundland, "is repeat what I was told." Be grateful for that: the result is a story so vibrant and detailed you don't read it so much as you race along and relive it, blow by staggering blow. The man is incapable of writing a dull sentence. The Johnstons of Newfoundland are poorer than Steinbeck's Joads, funnier than the McCourts of Angela's Ashes, and every bit as worthy as material. Which makes sense: there was no place on earth quite like bottomed-out Newfoundland, and there is no better book about it than this one. A brilliant and unforgettable story told by one of the masters of Canadian literature. — Ian Brown

“I have been a Wayne Johnston fan since my teens. His books are the ones that showed me that my own backyard was worth writing about. In Jennie’s Boy, a glorious tale of bedmobiles and jug baths drawn from his own life, he showed me what was behind closed doors just up the road from me. Like the best Newfoundland storytellers do, he made me laugh and then pause to think of how we can find love and joy in a most untraditional childhood.” — Alan Doyle

“Wayne Johnston’s childhood in Newfoundland was full of laughter, pain and poverty. And then laughter again. His memoir, Jennie’s Boy, is an uplifting account of a childhood not just survived—he came close to death too many times to count—but triumphed over. Thank god he lived to tell the tale.” — Rick Mercer