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If I Knew You Were Going To Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go Audiobook by Judy Chicurel
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Title: If I Knew You Were Going To Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go
Author: Judy Chicurel
Narrator: Emily Woo Zeller
Format: Unabridged
Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
Language: English
Release date: 10-30-14
Publisher: Headline Digital
Genres: Fiction, Contemporary
Publisher's Summary:
Judy Chicurel's exquisitely written debut evokes the atmosphere of a 1970s summer in a close-knit working-class community on Long Island. For fans of Jennifer Egan and Anne Tyler.
Katie and her young friends face a changing world, with prospects very different from those presented to their parents. The Vietnam War seems pointless to many but has devastated lives that remain broken even after the fighting is over.
As, with bittersweet humour, the characters' experiences unfold, daily events mirror bigger issues: an illegal abortion is plotted; the town is sinking into an economic abyss forcing Katie's friends to leave in search of more promising horizons; drugs claim the lives of those often too high to recognise the danger until it is too late; and Katie dreams of a boy back from Nam who's still fighting a battle she doesn't understand.
If I Knew You Were Going to be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go touchingly conveys the magic of everyday living during a darkened time.
Members Reviews:
... the town I grew up in so it was fun to see the parallels
It was loosely based on the town I grew up in so it was fun to see the parallels.
Beautiful Characters, Tragic Lives
Playwright and essayist Judy Chicurelâs debut novel is set in a slightly fictionalized Long Beach, New York in the summer of 1972. It consists of a series of related vignettes, all told first-person through the eyes of Katie, an eighteen-year-old, recent high school graduate.
Although she is a local, Katieâs observations of the decaying, blue collar remains of the former seaside resort town have the detachment of an anthropologistâs field notes. Surrounded by pervasive drug use, she limits herself to (copious) cigarettes, some alcohol, and the occasional joint. While nearly every chapter deals in some way with sex or its fallout, Katie is the consummate virgin. While her friends despair of never leaving âElephant Beachâ except through marriage or joining a cult, Katie is on her way to community college in the Fall.
Like the modern reader, Katie is somewhat removed from the spectacle of life in the working-class outskirts of New York City in the early Seventies. This allows her more freedom to analyze and critique the events she narrates for us, but it also adds an element of sterility to some of that analysis. It is as if we are looking at a photo album from forty years ago, in the company of the photographer, but she is not really in any of the pictures.
But what powerful images they are! Chicurelâs talent for shrewd, incisive characterization is exceptional. Although the novel starts off slowly, with hasty sketches of unsympathetic characters, it quickly moves on to more sophisticated stories about complex, real people wrestling with the harsh realities of the era. The shadows of racism, war, working poverty, and patriarchy loom over the dilapidated houses and ruined hotels of Elephant Beach, and Chicurel paints them for us in stark relief.
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Title: If I Knew You Were Going To Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go
Author: Judy Chicurel
Narrator: Emily Woo Zeller
Format: Unabridged
Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
Language: English
Release date: 10-30-14
Publisher: Headline Digital
Genres: Fiction, Contemporary
Publisher's Summary:
Judy Chicurel's exquisitely written debut evokes the atmosphere of a 1970s summer in a close-knit working-class community on Long Island. For fans of Jennifer Egan and Anne Tyler.
Katie and her young friends face a changing world, with prospects very different from those presented to their parents. The Vietnam War seems pointless to many but has devastated lives that remain broken even after the fighting is over.
As, with bittersweet humour, the characters' experiences unfold, daily events mirror bigger issues: an illegal abortion is plotted; the town is sinking into an economic abyss forcing Katie's friends to leave in search of more promising horizons; drugs claim the lives of those often too high to recognise the danger until it is too late; and Katie dreams of a boy back from Nam who's still fighting a battle she doesn't understand.
If I Knew You Were Going to be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go touchingly conveys the magic of everyday living during a darkened time.
Members Reviews:
... the town I grew up in so it was fun to see the parallels
It was loosely based on the town I grew up in so it was fun to see the parallels.
Beautiful Characters, Tragic Lives
Playwright and essayist Judy Chicurelâs debut novel is set in a slightly fictionalized Long Beach, New York in the summer of 1972. It consists of a series of related vignettes, all told first-person through the eyes of Katie, an eighteen-year-old, recent high school graduate.
Although she is a local, Katieâs observations of the decaying, blue collar remains of the former seaside resort town have the detachment of an anthropologistâs field notes. Surrounded by pervasive drug use, she limits herself to (copious) cigarettes, some alcohol, and the occasional joint. While nearly every chapter deals in some way with sex or its fallout, Katie is the consummate virgin. While her friends despair of never leaving âElephant Beachâ except through marriage or joining a cult, Katie is on her way to community college in the Fall.
Like the modern reader, Katie is somewhat removed from the spectacle of life in the working-class outskirts of New York City in the early Seventies. This allows her more freedom to analyze and critique the events she narrates for us, but it also adds an element of sterility to some of that analysis. It is as if we are looking at a photo album from forty years ago, in the company of the photographer, but she is not really in any of the pictures.
But what powerful images they are! Chicurelâs talent for shrewd, incisive characterization is exceptional. Although the novel starts off slowly, with hasty sketches of unsympathetic characters, it quickly moves on to more sophisticated stories about complex, real people wrestling with the harsh realities of the era. The shadows of racism, war, working poverty, and patriarchy loom over the dilapidated houses and ruined hotels of Elephant Beach, and Chicurel paints them for us in stark relief.