Saving Grandma (Calvin Becker Trilogy) - Softcover

Schaeffer, Frank

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0425157768 ISBN 13: 9780425157763

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group, 1997

Synopsis

Calvin Becker’s family are good Bible-believing missionaries; it’s their duty to spread the Word to everyone they meet. But now they face their greatest spiritual challenge right in their own home: Grandma. Foulmouthed, foul-tempered, and heathen through and through, she’s staying in the spare room, recuperating from a broken hip—and making it next to impossible for the Beckers to do the Lord’s work.
 
Calvin’s pious mom is determined to save Grandma’s soul, even if she’s doing it through gritted teeth. His father’s spending more and more time in his room, blasting opera records to drown out the old lady’s voice. And Calvin wishes things would just get back to normal so he could go on vacation and see his beloved Jennifer.
 
But now Calvin’s starting to understand Grandma a little better—and appreciate her a little more. After all, misery loves company.

About this title

About the Author:

Frank Schaeffer has worked as a director on a number of movies, both theatrical and television. Together with Frank J. Gruber, he also wrote the screenplay for the film version of Portofino. He lives in Massachussetts.

From Kirkus Reviews:

In a sequel to Portofino (1992), Schaeffer offers an uneven, if sweet-natured, comic tale of a boy's struggle for independence from his often-loony missionary family. Fifteen-year-old Calvin Becker is burdened with two squabbling, goody-goody older sisters, a volatile, quixotic father who's often stricken by dark periods the family calls ``Moods,'' and an emotionally overwrought mother who instructs Calvin to pray for wet dreams so he won't be tempted to masturbate. The Beckers run L'Arche, a Calvinist Presbyterian mission in Switzerland; when the supply of converts runs low, they turn their attention to ``saving'' handicapped children from the home next door. Calvin's only friend, through all this, is Jean-Pierre, a French boy with cerebral palsy who shares with home-schooled Calvin a near-inability to read; Calvin's only true comfort, it seems, is spinning elaborate fantasies about Jennifer, the beautiful English girl he sees for two weeks every year when the Beckers vacation in Italy. Calvin's mom is always crowing about having rescued his father from a coarse, heathen, working-class background, so it's little surprise that when Dad's mean-tempered mother, who spews bad language, racial slurs, and blasphemy in abundance, breaks her hip and comes to stay, the family is thrown into an uproar. Unhinged by stress, Calvin's father manages to escalate an obscure theological dispute with a neighbor into a full-scale feud that almost gets the Beckers expelled from Switzerland. Just when the fracas has settled down, Grandma contracts pneumonia, and when Calvin, who aspires to be a doctor, learns that his parents don't plan to treat her, he smuggles veterinary penicillin to her and saves her life--creating a strange bond between the two and providing the catalyst for Calvin's realization that it's finally time for him to escape for keeps. Good material, though with jokes that are often overplayed and a scattered, episodic structure that slows the story's drive. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0425157768
• ISBN 13: 9780425157763
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368