His reasons for not acting on them are less admirable: He likes Sarah and she’s the total package; why would he give that up just because every time he and Laurie have enough time together (and just enough alcohol) they nearly fall into each other’s arms? There’s no question where the book is going, but the pacing is just right, the tone warm, and the characters sympathetic, even when making dumb decisions. Rich in setting and detail, Ammaniti’s third, his first to be published here, rests contentedly on its YA bedrock. Anyone who believes in true love or is simply willing to accept it as the premise of a winding tale will find this debut an emotional, satisfying read. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents.

A boy in rural southern Italy learns about crime firsthand when he discovers that his own father is part of a kidnapping gang. Michele is with a group of four or five kids from his village—including his five-year-old sister Maria—when he plummets out of a tree right onto the hidden pit, which is covered by a mattress and sheet of corrugated Fiberglas, but he decides at once not to tell any of them (“He was mine. Laurie is misguided, but her effort and loyalty spring from a true heart, and she considers her project mostly successful. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. With the unfailingly witty voice of one of America’s favorite comedians, Seth Meyers’s debut picture book is bound for hilarity history.

Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. However, things don’t entirely go as planned, and the two friends learn the true meaning of bravery. Laurie finally begins to move on, creating a mostly satisfying life for herself, whereas Jack’s inability to be genuine tortures him and turns him into an ever bigger jerk. The arrival—as a houseguest, the children are told—of an old man named Sergio Materia, and then the gatherings of still other men, who argue angrily among themselves around the dining table into the wee hours—all are ominous signs.

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

If Skull was bad, Felice was a thousand times worse”), he’s made to swear never to go back to the pit again, since if he does, his father says, Filippo will certainly be shot.

Michele Amitrano is nine when one hot summer day in 1978 he falls—literally—onto a boy his own age being held prisoner, chained in the bottom of a deep pit out in the country. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….After Michele is discovered out at the pit trying to comfort Filippo, not only is he beaten up by gang-helper Felice (“Felice Natale was Skull’s big brother. Laurie’s hasty decision not to tell Sarah is the second painful missed opportunity (after not getting off the bus), but Sarah’s happiness is so important to Laurie that she dedicates ample energy into retraining her heart not to love Jack.