Green Grass Grace: A Novel
by Shawn McBride

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Book Reviews of Green Grass Grace: A Novel

Book Review: bouyant, irreverent sex-obsessed teen learns self-acceptance
Summary: 5 Stars

Hank's world view rotates around bra cup sizes, and his penchant for visually measuring every woman (including his own mother) comes in second place only to his compulsion to keep his hair perfectly coiffed. His sidekicks, the business-savvy but quintessentially nerdy Harry; schoolboy lethario Bobby and wheelchair-ridden Archie scour St. Patrick Street, observing and augmenting its subterranean and overt chaos.

Hank's infectious love of life, however, is tempered by the fightening knowledge that things are terribly askew at home. His father, Frances Toohey Junior, diverts his rage at a squandered life by having a scarcely-concealed affair with a neighbor. Perceptive, sarcastic Cecilia, Hank's beleaguered mother, walks a tightrope of acceptance and rebellion; despair rivals laughter as she copes with a disintegrating family and her own blight. Tormented by the death of his intended, Stephen, Hank's older brother, drowns his sorrow and numbs his feelings with alcohol; he comes to symbolize every dashed hope and derailed dream young men experience en route to hapless, pointless adult lives in mid-1980s Philly.

Depression never conquers Hank, as his focus steadies on Grace, a brazenly autonomous, astoundingly alluring young woman whose age belies her hard-won wisdom and steel-willed fearlessness. Grace's presence arouses Hank, and the literal manifestations of that arousal will remind every male reader of that painfully pleasureful introduction to sexual self-awareness. His romanticization of life's responsibilities lend a bittersweet quality to this fine debut novel.

"Green Grass Grace" recognizes urban emotional corrosion; "it's all channel changing and nose blowing" in Philly's repetitive row houses. Nonetheless, Hank declares war on joylessness, on the people who "bury the best of their love," who "lose chances, waste time, miss life." He refuses to back down to sadness, instead vowing to "inflict the Toohey Chop Suey on the hard-hearted." In Shawn McBride's sure hands, Hank emerges as a modern Don Quixote, and our fondest hope is that he never stop tilting at his St. Patrick Street windmills.

Summary of Green Grass Grace: A Novel

Everyone up and down St. Patrick Street, Henry's claustrophobic Irish-Catholic block in Philadelphia -- with its seventy-eight row homes, seventy-eight skinny mile-high lawns, seventy-eight statues of saints, and seventy-eight Mondale-Ferraro signs -- knows that the Toohey family is falling apart. Henry's mailman father is having an affair with a neighbor lady right under his mother's nose. His big brother has been a drunken mess since his girlfriend died. And his little sister is counting on him to keep her laughing through it all. But Henry has a plan to pull the family back together: He'll propose to his chain-smoking fourteen-year-old girlfriend, Grace McClain, at a neighborhood wedding. To prepare, he and his ragtag group of friends pinball around the streets, making elaborate plans for his proposal, riding bikes, rating breasts, bothering the local merchants, talking trash about Mike Schmidt and Bob Seger, and kissing behind the seafood-store dumpster.

Gritty, giddy, and bursting with Henry's boundless energy, Green Grass Grace is a heart-thumping rocket ride back to adolescence that is riotously funny and tragic at the same time.

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