The Crying Room

By Gail Myers

Book Overview

Confused and uncertain about life, death, sex, and music, about in that order, Rudy comes of age the summer before his final high school year in Galt, a town as dust-bowl depressed as its 1,800... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0595162908
• ISBN13: 9780595162901
• Release Date: February 2001
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.36 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

delightful story of a small town boy in the midwest

I highly recommend this book. The author is very gifted at getting and keeping your attention. His description of a drought stricken small town and its inhabitants is right on. Your heart will be with Rudy through all his adventures. The O. Henry ending will surprise you.

The Crying Room is a Completely Engaging Book

I expected to enjoy reading The Crying Room, but I did not anticipate I would enjoy it so completely. This is an engaging, well-written book that examines "coming of age" with introspection and understanding. The writing is honest and the characterizations (fictional and historic) "work" to provide the reader with a fascinating view of small towns and late adolescence in the 1940's.The concept of "the crying room" (the local movie theater's locked and private space for mothers to take noisy babies during films) was used provocatively by the author. The layered meaning behind the "crying room" added another dimension to this already excellent book. I did not want this story to end. A good read.

The Crying Room - delightful, poignant, thoughtful

The teenagers who grew up to become Tom Brokaw's "Greatest Generation" come to life in this book through the teen-age Rudy trying to get along in a fictional dusty small town in the Dakotas. The author tells a poignant story of the joys and heartbreaks of Rudy's loves and losses, as he plays his saxophone in a dance band one summer and dreams of how much better things will be in 1941 once this year is over.

Wonderful coming of age story

Life in a dust-bowl pre-Depression era comes across dramatically in Rudy's story like you were there to join the town's grief when a car wreck kills his best friend, when his favorite cousin dies of "the consumption" and as Rudy grimly copes with his selfish widowed mother. You share his unashamed pleasure in making music with an undistinguished seven-piece band in dance halls so predictably familiar on hundreds of middle America's unpaved main streets. A memorable story of a kid born into impressively hard times and how he survives.