Youth in Revolt: Now a Major Motion Picture from Dimension Films Starring Michael Cera

Overview

The hilarious, take-no-prisoners novel about a cynical, sex-obsessed teenager's pining love for an intelligent girl- now a major motion picture from Dimension Films starring Michael Cera

SIX MONTHS IN THE LIFE OF THE WORLD'S MOST DANGEROUS TEENAGER

Youth in Revolt is the journals of Nick Twisp, California's most precocious diarist, whose ongoing struggles to make sense out of high school, deal with his divorced parents, and lose his virginity result in his transformation from an unassuming fourteen-year-old to a modern youth in open revolt. As his family splinters, worlds collide, and the police block all routes out of town, Nick must cope with economic deprivation, homelessness, the gulag of the public schools, a competitive type-A father, murderous canines, and an inconvenient hair trigger on his erectile response-all while vying ardently for the affections of the beauteous Sheeni Saunders, teenage goddess and ultimate intellectual goad.

Editorial Reviews

Told as the diary of an oversexed 14-year-old, this three-part comic-novel deals with the usual adolescent bugbears: divorced parents, rebellion, virginity. Set in the cultural wasteland of trailer-park northern California, the episodic plot involves arson, car theft, police brutality and more. Nick tries to win an even more precocious girl his age, Sheeni Saunders, by means of allusive letters and screwball schemes which eventually backfire. Payne gives his narrator an overblown literary voice that contrasts with the attendant embarrassments of his age (e.g., the problems of finding a place to masturbate privately in an R.V.), but the narrative strains for comedic effect. With its Woody Allen-like punch lines, double entendres and overall high-school atmosphere, the novel reads like YA fiction: a nihilist Daniel Pinkwater. And for all Nick's intellectual pretension and artificial speech (qualities echoed, oddly, by nearly all the teenaged characters), he seems devoid of imagination or any redeeming qualities; nor does he care about anything other than satisfying his pubescent desires. And, though in the book's final third the boy comes alive in his drag persona of Carlotta (and Payne admirably brings home his convoluted plot), it is too late to revitalize an ultimately unsympathetic hero.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Author Information

Bio of C. D. Payne

C. D. Payne is an America writer of absurdist fiction and is also the author of the novels Youth in Revolt, Civic Beauties, Cut to the Twisp, Frisco Pigeon Mambo, Young and Revolting, and Revoltingly Young, all of which he has successfully self-published. He lives in Sonoma County.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Broadway Books

Filesize

2.10 MB

Number of Pages

544

eBook ISBN

9780307715807