Please Don't Kill the Freshman: A Memoir - Softcover

Trope, Zoe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060529369 ISBN 13: 9780060529369

Publisher: HarperTempest, 2003

Synopsis

I wrote a story about you. Well, sort of, see, it's mostly about me. Well, entirely about me, but here's the catch: I'm you. No, really, I mean it. Not like that transcendentalism stuff we're learning in English class, but really, truly, I'm you. I know what it feels like when your heart beats so hard against your white bone ribs, when you sing in the shower with soap in your eyes, when you run until you get a side ache. I wrote this story about you because I am so in love with you, your broken-fence teeth and your tissue-paper scars. I love you when you're so exhausted it could topple you to the ground, so in love it could snap guitar strings, so sickly sweet it could make lips smile. This is a reckless love story. This is my shameless confession.

About this title

About the Author

Zoe Trope exists. She was born in 1986 and graduated from high school with the class of 2003 in Oregon.

From School Library Journal

Grade 10 Up-The 44-page nucleus of this book was originally published by a small press when the author was 14. Her precociously perceptive and preternaturally poisonous pen then drew the attention of HarperCollins, which offered her a six-figure book deal to keep the caustic coming-of-age diary ranting and raving through the increasingly irrelevant remainder of her high school career. Zoe's entries chronicle her tortured search for truth in love and art, her faltering faith in the value of activism in the face of universal apathy, and her bottomless disdain for just about every figure and fixture in her high school life. The language is undeniably raw-a hip mixture of bald statement, cyberesque shorthand, and stream-of-consciousness prose. Her frank accounts of her transgender search for the perfect kiss and her first girlfriend who becomes her first boyfriend will surely shock certain audiences. Still, like Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower (MTV, 1999), this is an important offering for exceptional, alienated readers-the talented and the tortured misfits who need to know that they are not alone. The fact that a dorky teen can actually pursue personal success completely on her own terms; make lots of people read, wince, laugh, and think; and score a major wad of cash in the bargain will actually give them something to cheer about.
Jeffrey Hastings, Highlander Way Middle School, Howell, MI
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperTempest
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0060529369
• ISBN 13: 9780060529369
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304