CANR
WORK TITLE: We, Adults
WORK NOTES:
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BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.peterstensonwrites.com/
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COUNTRY:
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LAST VOLUME: CA 351
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married; children: three.
EDUCATION:Colorado State University, M.F.A., 2012; Western Colorado University, master’s degree, 2017.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Worked in retail, 2012-18; Colorado State University, Fort Collins, writing instructor; Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, M.F.A. faculty.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Bellevue Literary Review, Blue Mesa Review, Confrontation, Fourteen Hills, Fugue, Greensboro Review, Passages North, Post Road, and Sun.
SIDELIGHTS
Peter Stenson is a novelist, short story writer, and essayist. [open new]As a youth in Minnesota, he was not especially interested in reading, although he would occasionally try his hand at starting a novel. His parents belonged to the Presbyterian Church, where his mother volunteered, but his time spent wandering the church halls and basement spaces only led to experimenting with cigarettes. During his adolescence, between sixteen and eighteen, Stenson battled habitual alcohol abuse and drug addiction, including through stays at rehabilitation facilities. Reading and writing, he found, helped him stay sober. Around the age of seventeen, he wrote his first novel—readliy dismissed as juvenilia—on a laptop that he ended up pawning for ten dollars. Pursuing an M.F.A. at Colorado State University, he felt gutted by the criticisms of his first story but persevered, earned his degree in 2012, and published his debut novel the following year.[suspend new] His fiction and essays have appeared in publications such as the Sun, Fugue, Blue Mesa Review, and Greensboro Review.
In Fiend, Stenson’s first novel, he offers a different spin on the perennially popular zombie and the ways normal humans can be transformed into one. In Stenson’s view, zombies remain the slow-moving, shambling horrors popularized by George Romero and scores of writers of zombie-based fiction. Some of his zombie creations, known as “chucks,” have the macabre and creepy habit of giggling or chuckling whenever they are near a fresh human victim. Laughing zombies are frightening enough, but Stenson’s twist on the theme is that meth addicts, tweakers, and similar substance abusers can avoid succumbing to the conditions that create zombies, but only if they maintain their drug-induced high. Stenson’s interpretation finds very few differences between addicts and zombies, with both fully controlled by intense appetites and desires they cannot overcome.
Main character Chase Daniels and his friend Typewriter John are two methamphetamine addicts who, in the depths of a meth binge, miss the beginning of the zombie infestation that has taken over their world. They think their first glimpse of a newly created zombie—a young girl killing and eating a dog—is a hallucination. All too soon, they realize that the zombies outside their windows are real, and that their only chance of survival is to maintain a drug-fueled high. For Chase and Typewriter, however, the once- appealing notion of staying constantly jacked up on drugs takes on ominous and dangerous overtones in a world where zombies lurk and other addicts are murderously intent on maintaining their own status. Joined by Chase’s ex- girlfriend KK and the new boyfriend she picked up during a recent stint in rehab, they must find and make more drugs, which becomes their primary obsession. Stenson makes it clear that, in their own way, the non-zombie characters become as uncontrollably enslaved to their unnatural needs as the slow-moving undead hordes they are avoiding.
SF Signal contributor Timothy C. Ward remarked that Stenson’s story “was too seamlessly well-written to let me out until the end, and my appreciation has only grown since.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor called Fiend a “crisply written, grisly mashup tailor-made for black comedy junkies.” David Pitt, writing in Booklist, observed that the “zombie elements of the story are appropriately frightening,” and that the story in general is “very nicely done.”
[resume new]Thirty-Seven, Stenson’s second novel, revolves around the one survivor of a lethal cult. Fleeing an abusive adoptive father at age fifteen, Mason Hues ends up joining The Survivors, a cult led by a man called One—an oncologist nicknamed Dr. Sick by the media. His followers induce a state of stupefied illness by injecting a chemotherapy drug, leading up to a mass murder-suicide on the Day of Gifts. Alternating with this story line are Mason’s experiences after the fact, recovering from the trauma and trying to rejoin society. His burgeoning friendship with Talley takes an eerie cast as her questing spirit reminds him of his former life.
A Kirkus Reviews writer found Stenson’s second novel remarkable, as the “sentences devastate” and incisive portrayals of drug use, despair, and violence “suffocate the reader like a noose.” The reviewer found the characters “nuanced and warm” even as the narrative proves surpassingly “dark” and “intense.” Finding Stenson similar to Chuck Palahniuk only more “articulate … empathic,” and “intelligent,” the reveiwer reveled in the profusion of “prophetic visions, existential provocations, and ideological assertions” and proclaimed that Thirty-Seven will “break your heart, make you dizzy, and punch you in the gut” all at once. In Booklist, Carl Hays declared that Stenson’s “brilliantly vivid prose and striking characters” and investigations of the “darker side of humankind’s primal yearning for family” make for an “unnerving … spellbinding” novel.
An uncommon love triangle is at the center of Stenson’s next novel, We, Adults. Twenty-nine-year-old mother Elliot has ended up at her parents’ house in Minnesota with her three-year-old son, Jacob, after her professor husband, Devon, cheated on her with a student. Elliot’s turn for a fling comes when a teen skateboarder named Madison appears and the two instantly connect. Jail time looms for a character or two after Devon appears in town, takes Jacob to a water park without Elliot’s permission, and ultimately tells Maddie’s parents about what he has been up to. The narrative sequentially unfolds through Elliot’s perspective, Devon’s memoir, Maddie’s screenplay, and Jacob’s college admission essays. A Kirkus Reviews writer observed that “the shifting angles keep the story fresh with new developments always in store” as We, Adults proves a “memorable, enticing account of conflicting lovers.”[close new]
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, June 1, 2013, David Pitt, review of Fiend, p. 50; February 1, 2018, Carl Hays, review of Thirty-Seven, p. 39.
Entertainment Weekly, July 19, 2013, Keith Staskiewicz, review of Fiend.
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2013, review of Fiend; January 15, 2018, review of Thirty-Seven; May 15, 2024, review of We, Adults.
ONLINE
Literary Hub, https://lithub.com/ (February 20, 2019), Brad Listi, “Peter Stenson on Cults, Addiction, and Acceptance.”
Peter Stenson website, https://www.peterstensonwrites.com (June 15, 2024).
SF Signal, http://www.sfsignal.com/ (July 25, 2013), Timothy C. Ward, review of Fiend.
Suvudu, http://www.suvudu.com/ (July 1, 2013), Matt Staggs, “Zombies and Meth: An Interview with Fiend Author Peter Stenson.”
Westword, http://www.westword.com/ (July 24, 2013), Cory Casciato, “Fiend Author Peter Stenson on the Surprising Similarities between Tweakers and Zombies.”
My relationship with the written word was anything but love at first sight. Think apathy. Think indifference. Hell, we might have bumped up against mutual distain. It was a slogging sort of relationship, one where I struggled to decipher those strange little hieroglyphics inside of picture books, dreading the moment I’d be called upon to read a passage out loud in front of my elementary school peers. The written word and I hit rock bottom in third grade when I picked up the telephone and overheard my father talking to a Hooked on Phonics sales representative. I heard things like grade level and testing and WAY behind. Jesus. I was going to be one of those cringy kids from the commercials proclaiming Hooked on Phonics worked for me!
FML.
Fast forward through a year or two of vowel themed boardgames, forty minutes a day of silent reading (usually spent staring at the page but not actually reading), bedtime stories and morning stories and stories-before-you-do-anything-approaching-pleasurable and we were on the mend, the written word and I, step siblings accepting of one another’s presence around the dining room table. I even cranked out a few masterpieces during this time: a mafia/soccer star mashup, an epic about a boy getting lost in the woods (I’m pretty sure it was titled “The Axe”…obviously no thematic connection to the Gary Paulsen novels we were reading in school), and a medieval hero’s quest with a solid three pages (out of four) dedicated to the brutal slaying of a dragon.
Yes, things were changing.
Dare I say there was interest? Intrigue, for sure, the written word and I eyeing one another across the gymnasium floor during a middle school dance, insecure as we were desirous, praying for acknowledgment and a slow song and that we hadn’t overdone it with the fifth spray of Cool Water cologne.
I don’t remember all that much over the next few years as I spent high school consuming copious amounts of drugs. There are, however, flashes of memory, five second clips fused together to form a disjointed montage (obviously layered over a Radiohead track…is there another choice for a Tragically Misunderstood White Kid from Middle America?): tearing through Burgess and Kesey and Burroughs, composing a poem about a piece of amber in a random motel room after running away to New Orleans, delivering my “senior speech” to the entire school and receiving a standing ovation, scribbling notebook after notebook full of autofiction while locked in whatever thirty-day facility I happened to be frequenting that month. Like any montage worth a shit, these images have the dual mandate of conveying the passage of time and a shifting of character. And it was a shift. A growth. A realization. A passion and burning desire and the only thing that I truly cared about, the written word a goddamn lifesaver, literally, as in my fledging sobriety was predicated upon my ability to express myself on the page. Writing became the proverbial canary in the coal mine; when the words stopped, it was only a matter of weeks before I picked up again.
This has been true over the last twenty years.
That’s why I write every day. Rain or shine or the birth of my children or with hundreds of Comp essays to grade, I sit in my car and type my silly stories. Creating art makes me happy. It gives me purpose. It fosters the connection I so desperately crave, even if these people exist solely on the page, even if we are only able to commune for thirty-minute stretches while waiting for my daughters to finish their ballet classes.
This novel was borne from such half-hour stretches of time. After receiving my MFA from Colorado State University, I worked retail for six years (I can use a folding board like nobody’s business, and if you have any questions about how to care for your waterproof shell, I’m your guy). I wrote in the car before work, in the mouse-infested break room during lunch, and once again once our children were asleep. These were stolen moments, private moments free from the constant demands of needy customers. This tension for one’s time obviously exists within all people, but is, in my opinion, especially pronounced among those who work in any sort of customer service. The your-needs-over-mine mentality is ingrained in the retail sector, which, over enough time, can do a number on one’s psyche. This is the dynamic the characters of this novel, with the working title The Extraordinary Lives of Retail Employees, find themselves battling. Add into the mix infidelity and parenthood and love and you have this novel told in four parts, each character striving to navigate rage, resignation, humor and heartbreak as they make sense of the brief affair that sends their lives spiraling out of control.
This is my third published novel. My debut, FIEND (Crown), was named an Amazon Best Book of the Year, and my sophomore effort, THIRTY-SEVEN (DZANC), was awarded stared reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. I have essays and stories published where one publishes such things. I teach writing at Colorado State University and am part of the MFA faculty at Southern New Hampshire University. I live in Denver, Colorado with my three wonderful children and amazing wife. And it’s here I’ll once again turn to my sloppy, mixed metaphor illustrating my relationship to the written word: we’re married, have been for two decades, right smack dab in the heart of middle age, kids aplenty, stressed and pulled thin, familiar, yet still capable of standing at our Jack and Jill sinks, mouths foamy with Crest, catching a glance of the other through the mirror, our stomachs gripped by that sudden tornado of surprise and appreciation and awe that we’d felt years before, love, we think, I love you so much.
MY STORY
Fuck Yeah Writing
My relationship with the written word was anything but love at first sight. Think apathy. Think indifference. Hell, we might have bumped up against mutual disdain. It was a slogging sort of relationship, one where I struggled to decipher those strange tiny hieroglyphics inside of picture books, dreading the moment I’d be called upon to read a passage out loud in front of my elementary school peers. The written word and I hit rock bottom in third grade when I picked up the telephone and overheard my father talking to a Hooked on Phonics sales representative. I heard things like grade level and testing and WAY behind. Jesus. I was going to be one of those cringy kids from the commercials proclaiming Hooked on Phonics worked for me!
FML.
Fast forward through a year or two of vowel themed board games, forty minutes a day of silent reading (usually spent staring at the page but not actually reading), bedtime stories and morning stories and stories-before-you-do-anything-approaching-pleasurable and we were on the mend, the written word and I, step-siblings accepting of one another's presence around the dining room table. I even cranked out a few masterpieces during this time: a mafia/soccer star mashup, an epic about a boy getting lost in the woods (I’m pretty sure it was titled “The Axe”…obviously no thematic connection to the Gary Paulsen novels we were reading in school), and a medieval hero’s quest with a solid three pages (out of four) dedicated to the brutal slaying of a dragon.
Yes, things were changing.
Dare I say there was interest? Intrigue, for sure, the written word and I eyeing one another across the gymnasium floor during a middle school dance, insecure as we were desirous, praying for acknowledgment and a slow song and that we hadn’t overdone it with the fifth spray of Cool Water cologne.
I don't remember much over the next few years as I spent high school consuming copious amounts of drugs. There are, however, flashes of memory, five-second clips fused together to form a disjointed montage (obviously layered over a Radiohead track…is there another choice for a Tragically Misunderstood White Kid from Middle America?): tearing through Burgess and Kesey and Burroughs, composing a poem about a piece of amber in a random motel room after running away to New Orleans, delivering my “senior speech” to the entire school and receiving a standing ovation, scribbling notebook after notebook full of autofiction while locked in whatever thirty-day facility I happened to be frequenting that month. Like any montage worth a shit, these images have the dual mandate of conveying the passage of time and a shifting of character. And it was a shift. A growth. A realization. A passion and burning desire and the only thing that I truly cared about, the written word a goddamn lifesaver, literally, as in my newfound sobriety was predicated upon my ability to express myself on the page. Writing became the proverbial canary in the coal mine; when the words stopped, it was only a matter of weeks before I picked up again.
This has been true over the last twenty years.
That’s why I write every day. Rain or shine or the birth of my children or with hundreds of Comp essays to grade, I sit in my car and type my silly stories. Creating art makes me happy. It gives me purpose. It fosters the connection I so desperately crave, even if these people exist solely on the page, even if we are only able to commune for thirty-minute stretches while waiting for my daughters to finish their ballet classes.
I have two books forthcoming: my third novel, RETAIL EMPLOYEES (Regal House), and a linked story collection, THE SEXUAL LIVES OF SUBURBANITIES (JackLeg Press). My debut, FIEND (Crown), was named an Amazon Best Book of the Year. My sophomore effort, THIRTY-SEVEN (DZANC), was awarded Kirkus and Publishers Weekly starred reviews. I have essays and stories published where one publishes such things. I teach writing at Colorado State University and am part of the MFA faculty at Southern New Hampshire University. I live in Denver, Colorado, with my three wonderful children and amazing wife. And it’s here I’ll once again turn to my sloppy, mixed metaphor illustrating my relationship to the written word: we’re married, have been for two decades, right smack dab in the heart of middle age, kids aplenty, stressed and pulled thin, familiar, yet still capable of standing at our Jack and Jill sinks, mouths foamy with Crest, catching a glance of the other through the mirror, our stomachs gripped by that sudden tornado of surprise and appreciation and awe that we’d felt years before, love, we think, I love you so much.
Peter Stenson on Cults, Addiction, and Acceptance
In Conversation with Brad Listi on Otherppl
By Otherppl with Brad Listi
February 20, 2019
Peter Stenson is the guest on this week’s Otherppl. His new novel Thirty Seven is available from Dzanc Books. It is the official February pick of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club.
Stenson received his MFA from Colorado State University in 2012. His first novel, Fiend, was an Amazon Best Book of the Month for July 2013. His stories and essays have been published in The Bellevue Literary Review, The Greensboro Review, Confrontation, Blue Mesa Review, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and family in Denver, Colorado.
“The closest cult-like experience that I’ve had are my issues with addiction and alcoholism and stuff like that.”
Peter Stenson: Something has always drawn me to the concept of abandoning yourself to something larger than yourself. It’s like being taken care of and believing in something. In a lot of ways, it’s what my parents found in organized religion.
Brad Listi: What church?
PS: Presbyterian.
BL: That’s pretty low-key.
PS: Yeah, no speaking in tongues and it’s all pretty domesticated and barbless. There was always that draw ever since I was little to a group of people you dedicate your life to.
BL: You couldn’t find that in Presbyterianism?
PS: No, it was not my jam so much. We would always get picked up from school, and mom would need to go to the church and work and stuff. We would just roam around the church and in the bomb shelters from World War II or whenever it was. There was a pool table, and we would play pool and other weird things.
BL: It smelled weird?
PS: Yes, exactly. And we started smoking cigarettes and would do it down there. It was strange but it didn’t scratch the same itch as my fascination with cults.
BL: And that fascination with cults was all the way back to childhood?
PS: I think so. Not as strong as my wife’s, who read Helter Skelter like 10 times, but the draw was definitely there. The closest cult-like experience that I’ve had are my issues with addiction and alcoholism and stuff like that, being plucked from one situation and being put into treatment facilities or rehab or retreat or something like that and being forced to accept, these are your people for the next 30 to 90 days or however long it is.
You got to figure out how to get by with them and develop close bonds. It happens in a really short amount of time in my experience. As far as personal things I was drawing from, it was definitely that, out of that experience going to some place completely broken and finding a family of your own choosing. Those people in there, you get closer to them and share more things with them in a week than people you know your entire life that don’t know certain things about you.
BL: Isn’t it interesting how it’s sometimes easier to be intimate with people you barely know than to do it with people who are in your family?
PS: I know, it’s so bizarre, but so true. I would open up with strangers as long as they were dealing with the same affliction, with complete strangers in two minutes. However, with my parents, I would never venture with half the stuff.
__________________________________
“There are certain obsessions that I’m trying to work out.”
BL: I can’t imagine when you were in the depths of your struggles, you were doing too much reading, but maybe I’m wrong.
PS: You’re definitely not wrong. I wasn’t a huge reader growing up. I liked to write a fair amount. I would always have these grand ideas for novels, get ten pages in and, you know, not touch it again. All the addiction stuff happened in a pretty condensed period of time, from fifteen and sixteen to eighteen. It was Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift.
BL: One of the most harrowing addiction movies of all time.
PS: Once I started getting sober, it was back on. I would read a lot and write a lot. If I relapsed, I would stop, that process. I once wrote a novel on a laptop that I ended up pawning for ten bucks, which is a bummer. I mean, the novel was horrible. It was my first one. I was like seventeen, but I’d be curious to see it.
BL: What was it about?
PS: Me. At points I would accidentally make the narrator’s name Peter. It was awful, but it got weird too. I had just seen Kill Bill, so the last third there was all of a sudden these ninjas and stuff like that. It doesn’t really make sense.
BL: Like thousands of crows. I feel like you have a particular gift for taking the stuff of your life and the stuff of real life and synthesizing it into these horror fictions. I’ll give you an example. There is this kind of genius to the idea of writing in your first book Fiend, it’s like a zombie story but it’s tied to methamphetamine use. When somebody says that, it’s like that’s genius because there is some zombie quality to people who are cracked out on meth. How did that come to be?
And cults and addiction and religion, you’re synthesizing all this stuff—is there a through line from book to book in terms of how you might have thematic territory that you’re interested in covering but you’re unsure of what the way in is? Like, you said, your wife says to write about cults, and you think about meth and watch The Walking Dead. Can you talk a little bit about the creative genesis?
PS: I think there is a through line with both of my books. I remember in grad school my adviser Stephen Schwartz–
BL: Where did you go to school?
PS: Colorado State University. I had moved out from Minnesota to Fort Collins and went to school there. I had a pretty darn good experience there for the most part. My first workshop my story was really bad and everyone was so mean, and I just cried for days. Stephen, who was my adviser and was in that class, would later tell me that was the worst story I ever had submitted for any workshop. He said that when introducing me for a reading.
But anyway, he would always say to give in an hour, you’ll write your way into your obsessions. I found that to be true with really everything I’ve written, whether it’s short stories or essay or novels, both the published ones and the ones that are sitting on my hard drive. There are certain questions or themes or experiences that I’ve had and I’m trying to figure out. Sometimes that works well with the story, and sometimes it doesn’t. There are certain obsessions that I’m trying to work out.
BL: What are those? Can you name them?
PS: I think one—and it’s going to sound stupid and cliché—but I’m trying to figure out if there is a god or what it means to believe and what it means to put your faith in something. And then stemming from that is why any of this matter. It sounds so freshmen Philosophy 101, and it kind of is, but it’s what I think about all the time.
My natural defense mechanism when I’m being awkward and waiting to pick up my daughter and talking to the other parents, and they’re talking about Lululemon and school choices and teachers, and I’m just thinking about cutting my thighs and if there is a reason we’re alive. That’s kind of what I gravitate towards, some weird variation of that I find in most of my work. The search for love, and the search for acceptance would be in there too, and I think a lot of my characters are dealing with that and searching for that, and finding different means that supposedly fills that hole for a little bit, whether it’s substances or a cult or a belief or a love, and it inevitably comes up short every time.
Stenson, Peter THIRTY-SEVEN Dzanc (Adult Fiction) $26.95 2, 13 ISBN: 978-1-945814-31-0
The lone survivor of a cult tries to readjust to life as an average citizen, but when he meets a girl whose quest for honesty and happiness reminds him of his younger self, his future begins to look like his past.
Mason Hues' life has been one horrible situation after the next. His adopted father's predatory behavior propelled Mason to run away from home to join The Survivors, a cult whose members inject the drug Cytoxin--commonly used in chemotherapy treatments--which sickens them to the point of immobility. The closer the cult members get to death, they say, the more they gain a new appreciation for life, an appreciation which evolves into a longing to spread their "teachings" to others and culminates in a mass murder-suicide called the Day of Gifts. After surviving the Day of Gifts, Mason spends time in a juvenile penitentiary and a psychiatric ward, then rejoins society and meets Talley, with whom he forms a relationship that soon begins to follow the same downward spiral as Mason's life with The Survivors. With his second novel, Stenson (Fiend, 2013) proves to be a more articulate, more empathic, and more intelligent version of Chuck Palahniuk. Stenson's sentences devastate, and his characters are nuanced and warm, which makes the terrible things that happen to them and the terrible choices they make more painful to read about. Stenson's cutting descriptions of drug use, violence, and nihilistic despair suffocate the reader like a noose. Here's his description of "the American Dream," for example: "Every conversation is one-sided, a mirror reflecting looks and status and wealth. Every person is steeped in want...filling themselves with goods and sex and alcohol and validation so they forget about the fact that they all will die." Themes of immortality, sacrifice, self-hatred, and the artificiality of modern life feel new in Stenson's world, a world teeming with prophetic visions, existential provocations, and ideological assertions that will leave readers questioning the way they lead their lives.
A book that manages to break your heart, make you dizzy, and punch you in the gut all at once. You will be hard-pressed to find a novel as dark or intense in any bookstore.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Stenson, Peter: THIRTY-SEVEN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A522643010/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=54bcce45. Accessed 25 May 2024.
Thirty-Seven. By Peter Stenson. Feb. 2018. 282p. Dzanc, $26.95 (9781945814310).
Only a year after receiving his MFA from Colorado State University, Stenson published an offbeat first novel, Fiend (2013), about a group of methamphetamine users thriving during a zombie apocalypse, which rapidly developed a sizable counterculture following. His latest work sparkles with just as much edgy creativity as it tells the story of Mason Hues, aka "Thirty-Seven," the only remaining member of the Survivors, a suicidal cult run by a former oncologist euphemistically dubbed by the media as Dr. Sick. At 15, after fleeing a sexually abusive father, Mason lands on the doorstep of a remote Colorado mansion harboring 36 devotees of a man known as One, who believes that keeping people in a state of chronic, chemotherapy-induced illness fosters greater honesty and deeper connections. In an unnerving but spellbinding story line that alternates between Mason's days among his twisted adopted family and his later post-traumatic struggles following the cult's self-destruction, Stenson shines a spotlight on the darker side of humankind's primal yearning for family. His brilliantly vivid prose and striking characters deserve the widest possible audience.--Carl Hays
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Hays, Carl. "Thirty-Seven." Booklist, vol. 114, no. 11, 1 Feb. 2018, p. 39. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A527771879/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=190b4cff. Accessed 25 May 2024.
Stenson, Peter WE, ADULTS Regal House Publishing (Fiction Fiction) $20.94 3, 26 ISBN: 9781646034277
Stenson's character-driven novel features a disastrous love triangle.
Elliot Svendson is 29 and works at a Talbots store in her hometown of Roseville, Minnesota. She lives with her parents and her 3-year-old son, Jacob. This is not where Elliot wants to be--it's where she has ended up after catching her husband, college professor Devon Hester, cheating on her with one of his students. A skateboarding teen named Madison "Maddie" Johnson enters the picture. When Elliot first lays eyes on Maddie, she is smitten. Despite some initial reservations about the age gap, the two hit it off, and no public space is exempt from their sexual exploits. Maddie even bonds with young Jacob. Then, Devon shows up in Minnesota unannounced and makes the brash move of taking Jacob to a water park without Elliot's permission. Devon is arrested for the act, though all charges wind up being dropped. He's not the only one who will spend time in jail: After he informs Maddie's mother about Maddie's relationship with an adult woman, the wheels of outrage begin turning. The narrative offers different perspectives from different characters. The story begins with Elliot as the protagonist, followed by excerpts from Devon's memoir, followed by a screenplay written by Maddie, and finally concluding with college admission essays from a much older Jacob. The shifting angles keep the story fresh with new developments always in store; for instance, while Devon may initially appear to be an "insecure man who slunk through life as if eternally misunderstood," he later becomes much more multifaceted, and even likable. Maddie's screenplay proves to be more drawn-out than the other material. When Maddie's parents say things like "Proud of you" after he graduates high school, it's dull fare. Though such scenes build to later excitement, they make for a slow boil.
A memorable, enticing account of conflicting lovers--even if some portions are needlessly prolonged.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Stenson, Peter: WE, ADULTS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A793537217/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1a6dbaa8. Accessed 25 May 2024.