reviews_and_ramblings | Event: Reading with K.M. Soehnlein

A Different Light
489 Castro Street
San Francisco, CA 94114
Saturday, June 26, 1 PM
Free and open to the public

Robin and Ruby by K.M. Soehnlein
Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corporation; 1 edition (April 1, 2010)
ISBN-10: 0758232187
ISBN-13: 978-0758232182
Amazon: Robin and Ruby

K.M. Soehnlein, author of The World of Normal Boys discusses his new book Robin and Ruby and introduces us to Robin's sister Ruby, in this story of love, loss, and emotional upheaval..

In his award-winning bestseller The World of Normal Boys, K.M. Soehnlein introduced readers to the richly compelling voice of teenager Robin MacKenzie. In Robin and Ruby, he revisits Robin and his younger sister, masterfully depicting the turbulence of the mid-1980s-and that fleeting time between youth and adulthood, when everything we will become can be shaped by one unforgettable weekend.

Also available at this time: K M Soehnlein last novel - World of Normal Boys.

The World of Normal Boys by K. M. Soehnlein
Paperback: 296 pages
Publisher: Kensington (August 1, 2001)
ISBN-10: 1575666618
ISBN-13: 978-1575666617
Amazon: The World of Normal Boys

In his stunning debut novel, The World Of Normal Boys, K.M. Soehnlein captures the spirit of a generation and an era, embodied in the haunting, unstoppable voice of thirteen-year-old Robin MacKenzie, a modern-day Holden Caulfield, whose struggle for a place in the world is as ferocious as it is real.

The time is the late 1970s—an age of gas shortages, head shops, and Saturday Night Fever. The place, suburban New Jersey. At a time when the teenagers around him are coming of age, Robin MacKenzie is coming undone. While “normal boys” are into cars, sports, and bullying their classmates, Robin enjoys day trips to New York City with his elegant mother, spinning fantastic tales for her amusement in an intimate ritual he has come to love. He dutifully plays the role of the good son for his meat-and-potatoes father, even as his own mind is a jumble of sexual confusion and painful self-doubt. But everything changes in one, horrifying instant when a tragic accident wakes his family from their middle-American dream and plunges them into a spiral of slow destruction.

As his family falls apart day by day, Robin finds himself pulling away from the unquestioned, unexamined life that has been carefully laid out for him. Small acts of rebellion lead to larger questions of what it means to stand on his own. Falling into a fevered triangle with two other outcasts, Todd Spicer and Scott Schatz, Robin embarks on an explosive odyssey of sexual self-discovery that will take him beyond the spring-green lawns of suburbia, beyond the fraying fabric barely holding together his quickly unraveling family, and into a complex future, beyond the world of normal boys.

In The World Of Normal Boys, K.M. Soehnlein has created a dazzling gem of a debut novel in the tradition of Ordinary People and A Boy's Own Story, one that sparkles with raw honesty, poetic beauty, wry insight, and a rare richness of emotion that reverberates long after the last page is read. It is a story about growing up and falling apart, of rebellion and acceptance, of unspoken lives and irreversible choices that are made.