Karen

By Pete Vanek

Heart-breaking story of a disenfranchised teenager growing up with a single mother. The novel chronicles Caulden's struggles with his own insecurities on top of his mother's, and together they battle depression, poverty, suicide, and the emotional scars of domestic abuse. Caulden anguishes at being remarkably average trying to understand why he "can not be good at things." He even admonishes himself for botching the one attempted suicide, reflecting he could not even do that right. Caulden continually attempts to understand the wrenching changes to his mother, and himself after the seemingly light and breezy days when they lived on Karen way, and their subsequent drift to despair, loneliness, and more "crappy" apartments. Life is hard for young, Caulden as he is ordinary, until an extraordinary thing happens: "Who the hell are you, anyway?" "I thought you knew who I was, I'm Holden, you idiot. ... Hey, what are you doing? I wasn't serious, Buddy." The novel becomes the last testimony of Caulden Holfield as he transcends the legacy of Holden Caulfield, of "The Catcher in the Rye," calling out the phoniness around him and leaving a teenage writ on how to enter out of the cage of adolescence and into the world of traitorous adults.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1492368881
• ISBN13: 9781492368885
• Release Date: February 2014
• Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 318 Pages
• Weight: 0.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"