Book Summary: After being expelled from prep school, 17-year-old Holden Caulfield roams the streets of New York City in an attempt to avoid seeing his family…
Book Review: I really liked this book. I love that it was informal and conversational, and I LOVE the random, oddly specific quirks of different characters. It makes the characters seem so real and I felt like I was reading a real teenage boy’s journal. Usually, in books, the characters are relatively shallow and I can’t differentiate between some of them. However, these characters had so many different specific quirks, interests, talents, that they each had so much depth. It was also cool because I always kind of wonder what goes on in teenage boys’ heads and I felt that the book really highlighted Holden’s inner monologue. This book is also really short and easy to read, only around 100 pages.
Quotes: “Sometimes I act a lot older than I really am- I really do- but people never notice it. People never notice anything.” “But all the athletic bastards stuck together. In every school I’ve gone to, all the athletic bastards stick together.” “The trouble with girls is, if they like a boy, no matter how big a bastard he is, they’ll say he has an inferiority complex, and if they don’t like him, no matter how nice a guy he is, or how big an inferiority complex he has, they’ll say he’s conceited. Even smart girls do it.” “That killed me.”
Spoilers: There’s not much to spoil, I just made a list of some of my favorite character quirks that gave the characters have depth and made them seem so real: Mr. Spencer gets excited about blankets Luce has an alert gaydar Allie writes poems in green ink on his baseball glove to read when he’s in the field Jane keeps her kings in the back row in chess Ackley picks/pops his pimples and lacks social cues Bernice is a great dancer Ernest hits people with towels Dick pretended he had Holden’s suitcases and hid his own Phoebe writes notes and doodles her name in her school notebooks Phoebe changes her middle name to Hazle (not Hazel) because she writes stories about a girl named Hazle Weatherfield Sally has shallow conversations NYC tourist girls claim to see celebrities
