Overview / 简介: |
As Palmer comes of age, he must either accept the violence of being a wringer at his town's annual Pigeon Day or find the courage to oppose it.
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Foreign Customer Review / 国外客户评价: |
| Jerry Spinelli's "Wringer" is one of a very special class of books: a novel that is marketed to younger readers, but which also has much to offer adults. This is a powerful and hauntingly beautiful book.
"Wringer" takes place in the rural town of Waymer, a community known for a yearly event: Pigeon Day, during which sharpshooters fire at pigeons as they are released from cages. Those unfortunate birds which fall to the ground wounded, but not killed, have their necks wrung by boys known as "wringers." Traditionally, a Waymer boy becomes a wringer at age ten.
The novel follows the story of a Waymer boy named Palmer who does not want to become a wringer, but faces intense peer pressure to join in the tradition. "Wringer" is an intense study of social pressure, gender roles among children, bullying, and the rationalization of violence. The book also contains a memorable portrait of one very special human-animal "friendship." Palmer is a compelling hero, and Spinelli's stark writing style has a lyrical beauty which reminded me of Ernest Hemingway. Particularly interesting is Spinelli's use of symbolism involving popular culture icons. This is a remarkable novel which I recommend highly to readers of all ages. |
About the Author / 作者介绍: |
| Growing up, Jerry Spinelli was really serious about baseball. He played for the Green Sox Little League team in his hometown of Norristown, Pennsylvania, and dreamed of one day playing for the major leagues, preferably as shortstop for the New York Yankees.
One night during high school, Spinelli watched the football team win an exciting game against one of the best teams in the country. While everyone else rode about town tooting horns in celebration, Spinelli went home and wrote "Goal to Go," a poem about the game's defining moment, a goal-line stand. His father submitted the poem to the Norristown Times-Herald and it was featured in the middle of the sports page a few days later. He then traded in his baseball bat for a pencil, because he knew that he wanted to become a writer.
After graduating from Gettysburg College with an English degree, Spinelli worked full time as a magazine editor. Every day on his lunch hour, he would close his office door and craft novels on yellow magazine copy paper. He wrote four adult novels in 12 years of lunchtime writing, but none of these were accepted for publication. When he submitted a fifth novel about a 13-year-old boy, adult publishers once again rejected his work, but children's publishers embraced it. Spinelli feels that he accidentally became an author of children's books.
Spinelli's hilarious books entertain both children and young adults. Readers see his life in his autobiography Knots in My Yo-Yo String, as well as in his fiction. Crash came out of his desire to include the beloved Penn Relays of his home state of Pennsylvania in a book, while Maniac Magee is set in a fictional town based on his own hometown.
When asked if he does research for his writing, Spinelli says: "The answer is yes and no. No, in the sense that I seldom plow through books at the library to gather material. Yes, in the sense that the first 15 years of my life turned out to be one big research project. I thought I was simply growing up in Norristown, Pennsylvania; looking back now I can see that I was also gathering material that would one day find its way into my books."
On inspiration, the author says: "Ideas come from ordinary, everyday life. And from imagination. And from feelings. And from memories. Memories of dust in my sneakers and humming whitewalls down a hill called Monkey."
Spinelli lives with his wife and fellow writer, Eileen, in West Chester, Pennsylvania. While they write in separate rooms of the house, the couple edits and celebrates one another's work. Their six children have given Jerry Spinelli a plethora of clever material for his writing. |
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