Ellen Wittlinger - Hard Love



Looking for a smart, sensitive portrayal of teenagers growing up in the late nineties? Hard Love is the book for you. Jaded junior high and high school students, young college students and parents alike will be amazed at Wittlinger's perceptive, hard-hitting, complex young adult novel.
As a graduate student, I expected to feel mildly engaged with Hard Love; but to my surprise, I became deeply involved with this work. The first-person narrative of the main character, a high school junior named John, held my attention from the somewhat inauspicious beginning.
John is a young man who doesn't know if he's straight, gay, angry, happy, bored, or abandoned. His mother hasn't touched him at all since his father walked out on them years before, and his father is a wealthy playboy who gives John freedom--freedom to be ignored, freedom to turn into a block of ice.
At first, John infuriated me. I wanted him to talk, to stop whining, to tell his parents what was really going on. He comes across as a loner, a loser of a kid who's intelligent enough but keeps the world at a huge distance.



Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers; Reprint edition (April 1, 2001)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 068984154X
ISBN-13: 978-0689841545