In his charming blog "Off the Leash," Ken Dowell has posted a review of our title The Shame of What We Are by Sam Gridley. He describes the novel as a child's eye view of the weirdness of the 1950s and early 1960s, including mothers smoking while cooking dinner and postwar fathers being "pissed off at everything." The book's characters and period details ring true to him, even the scene in which the family drives cross-country with a baby sitting on her mother's lap in the front seat (no seat belts, of course).
I’m reminded also of the movie Boyhood, a coming of age tale covering roughly the same time of life albeit a half century later. . . .
What Gridley effectively captures, and it’s a lesson for parents of all eras, is that more often than not we don’t really understand what our kids think is important and what isn’t.
The post also includes a couple of the book's illustrations. Many thanks to Mr. Dowell, whose blog is always worth reading.
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