Ten Thousand Saints

You’ve been punked. There are few halos in view in this ensemble coming-of-age tale. Sixteen-year-old Jude Keffy-Horn, named for the saint of lost causes, and maybe a Beatles song, is a lost soul of a teenager. He lives a fairly meaningless existence in Lintonberg, Vermont (by which we mean Burlingt......more

This was well-written, but ultimately I had a problem with the book: it seemed the author backed off from showing the scenes of transformation that comprise the book. We see that Jude has adopted the straight edge lifestyle, but we don't see the months when this happens; we just see him after the fa......more

Yeah, I wasn't really convinced by Eleanor Henderson's too-long debut novel, set in New York City and southern Vermont in the early 1980s and starring a bunch of teenagers who, at various points, lose their virginity, smoke a lot of weed, huff freon, have a baby, get abandoned by their parents, die,......more

Eleanor Henderson's Ten Thousand Saints is the perfect example of how really excellent fiction is universal. I was not, at the outset, interested in the straight-edge music scene of the 1980s, an odd off-shoot of the punk music scene (in fact, I knew nothing about it), yet the beautiful rendering of......more

This is the best contemporary novel I've read in years. I dreaded reading it - the New York Times review was absurdly congratulatory, which riled up the contrarian in me. The subject matter is "straight-edge punk." Generally, I hate books focused on music, because the author tries to rely on feeling......more