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The Chester Chronicles

Chester "Chet" Patterson, the protagonist- narrator of Kermit Moyer's collection of linked stories, is an Army brat who grows up in the 1950s and comes of age in the 1960s. He has a high-strung knockout of a mother who may be drinking her way into alcoholism, an Army-officer father he both resents and admires, and a younger sister whose high-school popularity he can only envy. Moving every two or three years, Chester is a perennial "new kid" as well as a bookish and movie-besotted romantic who at the age of thirteen falls in love, he thinks, with his own first cousin, Frenchie, a seventeen-year-old "older woman." Each chapter is a discrete story that chronicles a pivotal moment in Chester's life, taking him a little deeper into himself as well as a little farther into the century, in settings that vary from the Far East to the Wild West and during a time that includes the birth of rock 'n' roll, the Civil Rights Movement, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The New York Times Book Review called Kermit Mpyer's first collection of stories, Tumbling, "a work of ringing authenticity" and called the author "an impressive new voice." Publishers Weekly praised Moyer's writing as "controlled and powerful and distinguished by a rare poetic ability."

  • Format
  • hardcover
  • Pages
  • 232
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781579621940
  • Genres
  • fiction
  • Release date
  • 2010