Join a book club that is reading Forever...!
Community Reviews
I understand why this book was important. I just didn't enjoy it very much.
This book was written in the mid-70s and it's mostly about the sex life of two teenagers. It is not erotic, it's humdrum. No, I'll clarify: it's humdrum today. In the 1970s, I can imagine this book would have been entirely different than whatever else was out there. As far as I can tell, nobody was writing books about normal teenagers having normal sex and then normal breakups and being normal people about it. It was all disaster and scandal and death and sadness and ruination. So I can see how normalizing this was important.
To be fair, too, another reason it was humdrum was the narrative style. The narrator, Katherine, was very straight-forward. There were a lot of this-then-that details about how a scene progressed and I often found myself wondering what was truly necessary in a paragraph.
Overall: important for the time, worth reading for people like me (teachers and YA fans), not really recommendable. I can think of many other books that deal with sex more appropriately for today's modern audience.
Oh, and one last note: the main male character named his penis. Ralph. Now I'm going to go ralph because ew. I so didn't need that in my life.
This book was written in the mid-70s and it's mostly about the sex life of two teenagers. It is not erotic, it's humdrum. No, I'll clarify: it's humdrum today. In the 1970s, I can imagine this book would have been entirely different than whatever else was out there. As far as I can tell, nobody was writing books about normal teenagers having normal sex and then normal breakups and being normal people about it. It was all disaster and scandal and death and sadness and ruination. So I can see how normalizing this was important.
To be fair, too, another reason it was humdrum was the narrative style. The narrator, Katherine, was very straight-forward. There were a lot of this-then-that details about how a scene progressed and I often found myself wondering what was truly necessary in a paragraph.
Overall: important for the time, worth reading for people like me (teachers and YA fans), not really recommendable. I can think of many other books that deal with sex more appropriately for today's modern audience.
Oh, and one last note: the main male character named his penis. Ralph. Now I'm going to go ralph because ew. I so didn't need that in my life.
See why thousands of readers are using Bookclubs to stay connected.