Growing an Inch

Rating:
Summary: A memorable and tender story
Review: Stanley Gordon West's ability to evoke the life of high school students is unparalleled. Their fears, joys, anguish, delights, and struggles with the serious business of becoming adult are all evident in this memorable novel. Like some of his other novels, this one is set in Saint Paul in the late 1940s, and involves young people at Central High. The hero, a physically small boy with a great heart, struggles to keep his family together at a time when the county welfare people want to place his brothers and sisters in foster homes. There is much more trouble, and the young man meets these crises with courage and ingenuity, even as he wrestles with his own sorrows. I think this may be the most valuable book ever written about growing up, a book that can change the lives of young readers and prepare them for an adult world.

Rating:
Summary: interesting characters
Review: West offers a direct line to absolute realism in this well told story. It kept me interested throughout the book. His descriptions and dialogue were so precise that I felt like I actually experienced Minneapolis in the 1950s and was simply recalling these already familiar places and people. The characters, flawed and so utterly consistent, offered depth and heart. One book that I read this year that I can actually recommend and read again.