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Summer Crossing by Steve Tesich In East Chicago, Indiana, in 1961, three high school athletes find themselves leaving school with nowhere to go. The future, they are told, is out there waiting for them, but they have no idea where to find it. Daniel Price and his friends Larry Misiora and Billy Freund have survived thus far on the strength of their friendship, and now their attempt to begin new lives threatens to destroy even that. Daniel is the only child of a proud Gypsy-like mother and an embittered Irish father – a tortured marriage that challenges and seems likely to defeat even Daniel’s resilient spirit. As his friend Larry rebels against East Chicago and its stunted lives and as Billy accepts the mean security of that safely familiar world, Daniels life is irretrievable changed by his chance meeting with a girl who is alien to everything he has ever known. Rachel Temerson has just moved to East Chicago, bringing with her the aura of a larger world. For Daniel she personifies the possibility of love and success, escape from helpless, bleak industry and factory whistles. Even as cancer wastes his hysterical, broken father – the final insult in a life reduced to overtime checks, jealousy and matchbook cover self-improvement schemes-Daniel falls in love. Rachel is his destiny, his guide to a life of promise. His friends and family soon become no more than obstacles to this dream of redemption. At first Daniel’s love is frustrated by what seems to him Rachel’s maddening whimsy, but what looks like whimsy points to something far more shocking – a family secret in which the roles of father, daughter and lover are wildly confused, and nothing is as it appears to be. Love, Daniel is told, is “both a sickness and a cure, and you never know which one you’re getting.” In this final summer of boyhood, Daniel experiences both the sickness and the cure, and from the struggle between the two begins to create himself. In Summer Crossing, Steve Tesich expresses beautifully the complexity of adolescent male friendship – ambivalent, competitive and curiously strong – and of youthful hopes, and then captures the turbulent feelings that change lives. At its center is a powerful love story: that of Rachel, whom no man can hold forever, and Daniel, who emerges from this summer of death and loss as if reborn, ready at last for life. NOTE…If buying 2 or more items, a 15% discount can be taken off the shipping charges.
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