Ten Thousand Saints - Softcover

Eleanor Henderson

3.5

7,192 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1780872194 ISBN 13: 9781780872193

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

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Vermont, New Year's Eve, 1987. All Jude wants to do is get high. All Teddy wants to do is get out. One of them won't live to see 1988. In the wake of this death, three teenagers will try to find a way of honouring their lost friend. Is clean living the answer? Is parenthood? Or the simplicity of carrying out a last wish? Winding its way through Vermont, New York, the Straight Edge music scene and the early days of the AIDS epidemic, Ten Thousand Saints is a fierce, brilliant depiction of all types of love and its flaws, of life, loss and pain; a profoundly human story that explores how one moment of carelessness can impact the lives of so many.

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Review:

Amazon Best Books of the Month, June 2011: Mostly set in the Lower East Side of 1980s New York City, Ten Thousand Saints is that rare book that paints scenes so vividly you can imagine the movie in your head. I wanted to live inside its pages, where I could imagine not just the scenes themselves, but the cameras, the lights, the actors reading their lines off to the sides of the set. Main character Jude Keffy-Horn--named after a Beatles song by his adoptive hippy parents--spends his high school days in small town Vermont getting high with his best friend Teddy, waiting to turn 16, when he can legally drop out. When Teddy dies of an overdose on the last day of 1987, Jude is sent to live with his pot-dealer father in New York City. Jude soon falls in with a group of straight edge Hari Krishnas, where his commitment to abstinence in all forms--drugs, sex, meat--becomes an addiction itself. Jude struggles to create an identity amongst the extreme movements taking root downtown, while his parents struggle to understand their son’s rejection of their free love culture. Author Eleanor Henderson's meticulous research into the straight edge movement in the late 1980s has opened a door to a piece of history handled with love, care, and incredibly unforgettable characters. --Alexandra Foster

From the Back Cover:

In the roiling, electrified streets of New York City in the 1980s, Eliza, Jude, and Johnny each show up wanting a place to hide--from everything that has gone wrong, big and small, in their short lives. These three, thrown together by their parents' mistakes and their own, and by the accidental death of a teenage boy, find their regrets transformed into a single, covert mission. Possibility shines from every neglected, graffitied surface. Possibility rings in the hardcore music and seething energy of the city's underground scene. But as they pursue the intoxicating promise of redemption and new life, their secret threatens to crush their alliance with its impossibly heavy burden.

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