Columbine

by Raymond Kennedy

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374126437
• ISBN13: 9780374126438
• Release Date: January 1980
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 377 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The Stephen King of his generation

Reading Columbine, it's hard not to imagine that it was written by Stephen King, himself. Kennedy brings the same passion for plot, the same careful word choice, the same intellectual rigor as King at his best. Kennedy mines a series of comfortably familiar cliches in this masterpiece, examining with Disney-esque rhaposodic lyricism the relationship between two young friends in a coming of age story that screams "Turn me into a Lifetime Movie of the Week."Oprah, have you seen this book? It was Oprah Book Club stuff before there was an Oprah Book Club.

Evocative and disturbing - what more could you ask for?

It's been 20 years since I read this book, but many of its images have stuck with me. What I am left with today is the memory of a great sadness and longing, as if I too had lived through such an experience, or as if the book summed up for me much of what we all have lost: that part that never can be ours. Set in a time during and after World War II, in urban Pennsylvania, if I recall correctly, the book follows the psychic history of a young man, the girl next door (literally; and she is truly just a girl when he meets her) and the community of people whose lives they touch. Columbine is just the youngest of a family of sisters who interest the young man; to her, he is at first a picture on the piano, a handsome young man in a uniform, someone she may never know, and someone who may never return. He does return, and they begin a frustrated friendship; he follows her "career" from afar. His interest in her is unfocused; she is both luminous and common. The novel is evocative of time and place, and also of American attitudes at mid-Century. There is a haunted quality to it; the young man surely is haunted. For look, here is a whole book about her, and her place in the wide world.

Excellent

This is one of the best books I have ever read. The author has wonderful descriptive ability...definetly a classic.