OLDER FICTION
Paulsen, Gary

The Beet Fields: Memories of a Sixteenth Summer

(3) YA In an archetypal coming-of-age story, an unnamed boy leaves his alcoholic mother for a vagabond life of farm labor, hitchhiking, strangers both goodhearted and not, dubious poker winnings, carny shilling, and finally manhood in the arms of a stripper named Ruby. The tone is sometimes self-consciously earthy, but the focus is intense and immediate, as is the sense of dusty rural America of the 1950s.

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