What do you get when you
cross something like American Graffiti (only with
a single protagonist), After Dark (except with a
setting in the Oregon countryside rather than New York),
and The
Catcher in the Rye (but with a more naive, romantic
protagonist who ends up at dawn, not like Holden watching
his sister Phoebe on a carrousel, but at the top of a Ferris
Wheel with a girl named Colleen at the county fair)? You
get The Turning, a young-adult novel that every
adult will love as well.
A novel
that the New York Public Library
placed on its list of “the best of the
previous year’s publishing for teenagers”
that School
Library Journal said is “a
touching tale . . . that will find a wide audience” with “characters
that are believable and well developed”
that the Pennsylvania
School Librarians Association selected for their “Young
Adult Top Forty” list
that Appleton
Wisconsin High School selected for their “Top
Fifteen Books of the Year”