Too Cool - Softcover

Brenna, Duff

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0991328116 ISBN 13: 9780991328116

Publisher: Serving House Books, 2014

Synopsis

Sixteen-year-old Elbert Earl Evans (known as Triple E) bursts out of Goodpasture Correctional Facility and speeds toward freedom in a stolen Oldsmobile. As he outraces the police, his car stalls in the Colorado badlands in the middle of a snowstorm and he is stranded with his girl-, Jeanne. Once he sets out on foot to find help in a landscape of bone- chilling desolation, his mind becomes a blizzard of memories and images, from the soft, sweet voice of his grandmother to his father?s cruel betrayal to the stark words of a writer named Kafka. The past becomes inseparable from the present as he fights to stay alive?and relives the twisting, tragi-comic odyssey that has brought him to this desperate point. A classic tale of disaffected youth and the yearning for redemption set against the modern American West, Too Cool takes us into the heart and mind of a young man struggling to confront the violence in his nature and find the humanity within.

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Review

Elbert--a.k.a. Triple E--Earl Evans, brings new meaning to the term "Problem Child." According to his teacher and unstoppably positive moral supporter, Miss Bridgewater, Triple E has "more poetry in his soul than he knows." That may be the case, but it's a long, frightening journey to wherever that poetry lies buried. On its surface, Too Cool follows our young hellion protagonist as he busts out of reform school and into the raging heart of a Colorado blizzard, where he finds himself fighting for his own survival and that of his faithful sweetheart Jeanne. Beneath that, however, Duff Brenna's third fictive endeavor is the tale of Triple E's lifelong trek across another frozen landscape--a seemingly hopeless past, present, and future populated by a drunkard father, shady friends, a little bad luck, a lot of bad choices, and a hopelessly twisted psyche, equal parts fury and seriously misplaced sexual longing.

Brenna isn't as engagingly psychosexual as Dennis Cooper or as humorous or hip as Denis Johnson. He does, however, demonstrate a special kind of bravery in creating his lead character. When Triple E isn't engaging in bad-ass posturing or self-hatred, he's beating the snot out of drunks, for a few dollars or just for the heck of it. He's not an easy guy to like. Given this, the wonder is that the prose moves along at a fairly steady clip, though the reader can occasionally feel as bludgeoned as one of Triple E's boxing opponents. --Bob Michaels

From the Publisher

"An unfaltering, unflinching, piercing look into a tormented youthful heart...brilliantly evoked...."--Richard Bernstein, New York Times

"Pacing his narrative with the suspense of a thriller, Brenna writes grippingly and with uncanny insight into the mind and heart...." Publishers Weekly, starred

About this edition

• Publisher: Serving House Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0991328116
• ISBN 13: 9780991328116
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 196