The Slide
Kyle Beachy
Rated: 3.50 of 5 stars
3.50
· 6 ratings · 306 pages · Published: 27 Jan 2009
--Jincy Willett, author of The Writing Class and Jenny and the Jaws of Life
"Suspenseful, erotic, funny, and terribly sad, THE SLIDE presents the long, hot 22nd summer of Potter Mays, the most ethical sexual deviant this side of Portnoy--or Hamlet."
-- James McManus, New York Times bestselling author of Positively Fifth Street
"With THE SLIDE Kyle Beachy turns the coming-of-age story on its ear. But THE SLIDE is about a lot more than a young man's increasingly frantic efforts to figure himself out. There's the decay of both the American city and the American nuclear family, the painful inevitability of friends and lovers growing apart, and the ongoing difficulty of denying one's base appetites. Plus baseball. Lots of baseball. What's most impressive, though, is that Beachy has emerged in his debut as a fully-formed stylist. His writing is propulsive, unique without being forced, and eminently readable."
-- Ron Currie Jr., author of God is Dead
"Refreshingly sincere." -- Joe Meno, author of The Great Perhaps
"Kyle Beachy has written a knockout first novel. Part love letter to the American Midwest, part ghost story, and part heartbreaking tale of one young man's struggle to find forgiveness as well as himself, this is a book that
you won't want to miss."
-- Cristina Henriquez, author of Come Together, Fall Apart
"Beachy has a wry wit, a wily sense of the ridiculous, and an athletic gift for description. Consequently, frissons of weirdness steer this tale of lateonset maturity in unexpected directions as Potter takes a crummy job delivering bottled water, concerns himself inappropriately with a lonely boy in a catastrophically messy house and the 16-year-old girl next door, talks to the ghost of his long-dead brother, and is badly manipulated by the worst friend a hapless guy could have. Even his passion for baseball fails to halt his slide into the morass. Beachy perfectly captures the brain-fogging mugginess of summer in the Midwest and the quarry-deep reticence of midwesterners in a funny and endearing novel about a bumbling guy who makes bad situations worse with the best of intentions."
-- Booklist
"[THE SLIDE] is at once hilarious, strange and uncomfortable...Beachy’s characters, infinitely fallible, are real and fleshy, and their loneliness is palpable."
-- Publishers Weekly
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- contemporary 3
- family 3
- sports 3
- summer 2
- coming of age 2
- literary fiction 2
- psychological 1
- epic 1
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