Home Boy

by Jimmy E. Cheshire

Book Overview

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0452264413
• ISBN13: 9780452264410
• Release Date: August 1990
• Publisher: Plume Books
• Length: 32 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

A wonderful first novel

Home Boy is my first novel and the Publisher's Weekly review here on this page is about another book, one about the Columbus Zoo. My book, Home Boy, is about a 17 year old boy who has grown up in a home for boys where the adults hired to care for the kids are often incompetent, frequently mean and bullying, and too often sexually deviant. I read the last forty pages or so recently and I was impressed with the writing and moved to tears by the tenderness and love in the story. Francis Moul, the man who reviewed the book for the Omaha World Herald, said "Chesire has given us a unique, frank and masterful look at the only home he had for nearly a decade." Dan McCall, Cornell professor of American studies and author of Jack the Bear, Bluebird Canyon, Triphammer and several other books, says it's "a beautiful book." British writer Michael Carson, who I wrote a fan letter to after reading his wonderful first novel, Brothers in Arms, said he was impressed with "the goodness" of the main character and said the book was "truly moving, hypnotic, warm and wise." The story grew out of my own experience growing up in a home for boys (Father Flanagan's Boys Town out in Omaha, Nebraska), but it is fiction. Only the situations and feelings and insights are true. We got a copy of the book into the hands of the current director of Boys Town (now called Girls and Boys Town) and he was outraged. He said the book was "a publicity stunt..opportunistic," that I was shamefully, sadly, using "sex to sell a book" -- a major struggle our main character has is with his sexuality, trying to decide whether he is queer or not (the word gay wasn't in the lexicon in 1963, the time of the story). There's a bit of hot sex in the book and if homoerotic sex makes you squirm, be careful, because there's some of that here.The director of Boys Town really offended me and hurt my feelings, hating the book (naively, I had hoped he'd be proud of me for having been the first graduate of the home to ever publish a novel, and one put out by a big publishing house, too). He dismissed the book, calling it "an adolescent homosexual fantasy," said my own kid wouldn't want to read it or be proud of me for having written it (She did read it and she loved it). He found it "just plain disgusting." This guy, a Catholic priest, said he couldn't finish the book: "You can find out what is in a chamber pot by using a stirring stick," he said. "You don't have to put your whole hand into it." (Omaha World Herald, Sunday, Aug 27, 1989). I never knew what a chamber pot was until he characterized my book and its contents in this way. Anyway, Home Boy by Jimmy Chesire is not about the Columbus Zoo. It's about a boy who has grown up in a home for homeless boys, and a mildly-to-wildly dysfunctional one at that. I hope some of you will give it a read.