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Chargement... Red Weather: A Novelpar Pauls Toutonghi
   Books Read in 2014 (1,881) Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre.  BookConcierge | Feb 16, 2016 |   HarvReviewer | Feb 11, 2009 | aucune critique | ajouter une critique
The setting is Milwaukee, Wisconsin--if not America's heart, then at least its liver--home to an array of breweries and abandoned factories and down-on-their-luck Eastern European immigrants. The year is 1989. Revolutions are sweeping through the nations of the Eastern Bloc. Communism is unraveling. And nobody feels this unraveling more piquantly than Yuri Balodis--a fifteen-year-old first-generation American living with his Latvian-immigrant parents in Milwaukee's Third Ward. It's a turbulent time. And when Yuri falls in love with Hannah Graham--the daring daughter of a prominent local socialist--chaos ensues. Within weeks, Yuri is ensnared by both Hannah and socialism. He joins the staff of the Socialist Worker. He starts quoting Lenin and Marx indiscriminately. His parents, of course, are horrified and deeply saddened. They try to educate him, to show him why, in their opinion, communism has ruined so many lives. But Yuri is stubborn. And his ideological betrayal will have more serious consequences than breaking his parents' hearts. Red Weather is by turns funny and bittersweet, tinged with a rueful comic sense that will instantly remind you of the absurd complications of love. Pauls Toutonghi's stunning debut novel is at once reminiscent of Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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 Google Books — Chargement...GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne: (3.71)
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Yuri is a gangly teen and unsure of his life’s path, but he is a good student and reads widely, partly because his mother brings home a variety of books from her job at the Milwaukee Public Library. He slips out of their apartment one early morning when he can’t sleep and comes across a curious group of “protesters” who are trying to sell a newspaper titled Socialist Worker to the employees of a produce company. One of these is a very pretty girl Yuri recognizes from high school, and he is instantly smitten. But how can he love a Socialist, when he parents sacrificed so much to escape Communism? More importantly, how can he love a Socialist, and still love his father?
This dilemma forms the central conflict of this coming-of-age novel. It is in turns poignant, and hilariously funny, full of the angst of teen love and the missteps of youth. Yuri, like all teens, is embarrassed by his parents, while simultaneously feeling guilty about this. He longs for the perfect suburban life he imagines his classmates enjoy, and yet finds a certain beauty and comfort in his own family life.
Toutonghi does a fine job of writing this story – I found it entertaining and enjoyable. But … The city is practically a character in the book; the setting is that important to what is happening. I live in Milwaukee and the geography he writes is completely wrong. Streets he mentions run the wrong direction; sounds of the ball games at the stadium cannot carry the 5 miles to Yuri’s apartment (and wouldn’t be heard over the noise of the freeway that borders the area on two sides); there are no large supermarkets or strip malls in the neighborhood in which the author sets the story. Would it have taken all that much effort to get the geography right, or to give the city a fictitious name? (