Big Mouth & Ugly Girl - Hardcover

Oates, Joyce Carol

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0066237564 ISBN 13: 9780066237565

Publisher: HarperTempest, 2002

Synopsis

Matt Donaghy
has always been a
BIG MOUTH

but it's never gotten him in trouble - until one day when two detectives escort him out of class for questioning. Matt has been accused of threatening to blow up Rocky River High School.

Ursula Riggs
has always been an
UGLY GIRL

A loner with fierce, staring eyes, Ursula has no time for petty high school stuff like friends and dating - or at least that's what she tells herself. Ursula is content with minding her own business. And she doesn't even really know Matt Donaghy.

But Ursula is the only person who knows what Matt really said that day . . . and she is the only one who can help him.

In her first novel for young adults, acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates has created a provocative and unflinching story of friendship and family, and of loyalty and betrayal.

About this title

About the Author

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

From AudioFile

Never were a pair so completely mismatched! Matt Donaghy, affable big mouth and vice president of the junior class, and Ursula Riggs, tough-spirited loner and hoops star, might never have crossed paths were it not for Matt's irreversible error, his loud, sarcastic, seemingly harmless joke about blowing up Rocky River High. Screen celebs Hilary Swank and Chad Lowe deliver alternating chapters in perfect counterpoint, superbly capturing the divergent emotional journeys in affect, tone, and pacing. When Matt is arrested and his life changes forever in a downward spiral of suspicion, fear, guilt by association, and media madness, gruff Urs is the only one to defend him, an act born of pure conscience and moral fiber that nevertheless leads to emotional entanglement. Matt's panic, his fury, his pitiful whining are juxtaposed with Ursula's harsh, unruffled, and unrelenting sarcasm. Even the urgent e-mail exchanges find voice in an audio recording that will be in huge demand by teens. T.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperTempest
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0066237564
• ISBN 13: 9780066237565
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 266