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Ten Thousand Saints: A Novel Kindle Edition
A sweeping, multigenerational drama, set against the backdrop of the raw, roaring New York City during the late 1980s, Ten Thousand Saints triumphantly heralds the arrival of a remarkable new writer. Eleanor Henderson makes a truly stunning debut with a novel that is part coming of age, part coming to terms, immediately joining the ranks of The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud and Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude. Adoption, teen pregnancy, drugs, hardcore punk rock, the unbridled optimism and reckless stupidity of the young—and old—are all major elements in this heart-aching tale of the son of diehard hippies and his strange odyssey through the extremes of late twentieth century youth culture.
“Eleanor Henderson is in possession of an enormous talent which she has matched up with skill, ambition, and a fierce imagination. The resulting novel, Ten Thousand Saints, is the best thing I’ve read in a long time.” —Ann Patchett, #1 New York Times–bestselling author
“[A] rare debut that, with a flinty kind of nostalgia, invokes both the gods and demons of a generation.” —Vogue
“An irresistibly rich and engrossing novel . . . poignant, complex . . . Henderson brilliantly evokes the gritty energy of New York City in the ’80s, and the violent euphoria of the music scene. The hard-edged settings highlight the touching vulnerability of young characters.” —O, The Oprah Magazine, Best Fiction 2011
“A modern, drug-and-rock-riddled version of Peter Pan.” —San Francisco Chronicle
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarperCollins e-books
- Publication dateJune 7, 2011
- File size3605 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, June 2011: Mostly set in the Lower East Side of 1980s New York City, Ten Thousand Saints is that rare book that paints scenes so vividly you can imagine the movie in your head. I wanted to live inside its pages, where I could imagine not just the scenes themselves, but the cameras, the lights, the actors reading their lines off to the sides of the set. Main character Jude Keffy-Horn--named after a Beatles song by his adoptive hippy parents--spends his high school days in small town Vermont getting high with his best friend Teddy, waiting to turn 16, when he can legally drop out. When Teddy dies of an overdose on the last day of 1987, Jude is sent to live with his pot-dealer father in New York City. Jude soon falls in with a group of straight edge Hari Krishnas, where his commitment to abstinence in all forms--drugs, sex, meat--becomes an addiction itself. Jude struggles to create an identity amongst the extreme movements taking root downtown, while his parents struggle to understand their son’s rejection of their free love culture. Author Eleanor Henderson's meticulous research into the straight edge movement in the late 1980s has opened a door to a piece of history handled with love, care, and incredibly unforgettable characters. --Alexandra Foster
From Publishers Weekly
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review
From the Back Cover
Adopted by a pair of diehard hippies, restless, marginal Jude Keffy-Horn spends much of his youth getting high with his best friend, Teddy, in their bucolic and deeply numbing Vermont town. But when Teddy dies of an overdose on the last day of 1987, Jude's relationship with drugs and with his parents devolves to new extremes. Sent to live with his pot-dealing father in New York City's East Village, Jude stumbles upon straight edge, an underground youth culture powered by the paradoxical aggression of hardcore punk and a righteous intolerance for drugs, meat, and sex. With Teddy's half brother, Johnny, and their new friend, Eliza, Jude tries to honor Teddy's memory through his militantly clean lifestyle. But his addiction to straight edge has its own dangerous consequences. While these teenagers battle to discover themselves, their parents struggle with this new generation's radical reinterpretation of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll and their grown-up awareness of nature and nurture, brotherhood and loss.
Moving back and forth between Vermont and New York City, Ten Thousand Saints is an emphatically observed story of a frayed tangle of family members brought painfully together by a death, then carried along in anticipation of a new and unexpected life. With empathy and masterful skill, Eleanor Henderson has conjured a rich portrait of the modern age and the struggles that unite and divide generations.
About the Author
Eleanor Henderson was born in Greece, grew up in Florida, and attended Middlebury College and the University of Virginia. Her debut novel, Ten Thousand Saints, was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2011 by the New York Times and a finalist for the Award for First Fiction from the Los Angeles Times and was adapted into a film in 2015. An associate professor at Ithaca College, she lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband and two sons.
Product details
- ASIN : B004MMEIIW
- Publisher : HarperCollins e-books; Reprint edition (June 7, 2011)
- Publication date : June 7, 2011
- Language : English
- File size : 3605 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 403 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #462,320 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #145 in LGBTQ+ Family Life Fiction (Books)
- #1,892 in Read & Listen for Less
- #2,558 in U.S. Historical Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Eleanor Henderson's latest novel is The Twelve-Mile Straight (Ecco, 2017). Her debut novel, Ten Thousand Saints (Ecco, 2011), was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2011 by The New York Times, was a finalist for the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction from the Los Angeles Times, and was adapted into a movie in 2015. Her work has appeared in Agni, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Poets & Writers, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Best American Short Stories. With Anna Solomon she is the co-editor of Labor Day: True Birth Stories by America's Best Women Writers (FSG, 2014). An associate professor at Ithaca College, she lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband and two sons.
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Overcome with grief over the death of his best friend, yet unable to express himself, Jude heads to New York and finds Johnny, Teddy's straight-edge half-brother. (Straight-edge kids swear off drugs, alcohol, sex, and often meat, but follow the hardcore punk scene.) When they find out that Eliza is pregnant with Teddy's child from their encounter at the party the night he died, Johnny sees this as a chance to form a real family, one that has escaped him for so long. Yet he must deal with the demons inside himself, as well as Jude's jealousy, on so many different levels. This is a book about finding yourself and realizing what makes a family, about the hardcore music scene of the late 1980s and the changing demographics of New York City, and about trying to avoid making the same mistakes your parents made.
I thought this book was pretty fantastic. Eleanor Henderson created some truly memorable characters and gave each surprising depth, which made me feel truly invested in what happened to them. There were a few times I worried the book would veer into overly dramatic plot twists, but each time, Henderson remained true to the characters and her story, and I was grateful for that. No one is infallible in this book, much as in life, and that is what made the story so appealing to me--although I couldn't necessarily identify with all of the characters and what they were going through, I felt as if all of the characters were realistic, particularly to the places and time in which the book took place. I flew through this book and of course, I'm sorry I finished it so quickly, because I want more. But I look forward to seeing what Henderson comes up with next!
One of the strengths of the book is the narrative. The author writes in clear and unflinching prose refraining from judgment as the characters indulge in such activities as snorting and huffing various toxic substances, marijuana use far in excess of recreational, violence, deceit, and other activities deemed questionable at best by society. The result of this is a powerful picture of people who are vulnerable and confused, yet still, somehow admirable in their humanity and their honesty.
This works best with the young people in the novel. Jude and Johnny are flawed protagonists searching for something more than the bad hands they have been dealt. As much as the world around them is uncompromising in its decay and nihilism, Jude and Johnny’s responses and chosen creeds are as extreme and unyielding. This eventually drives the two characters apart from each other and many other characters in the novel.
The too few music scenes in the novel are captivating. The author transports the reader into the fantasy world of hard driving music through the eyes and ears of a post-adolescent. The shows were some of my favorite parts of the novel. Just as such magic is fleeting in real life, so are they too rare in the book.
Every character over thirty in the novel is a train wreck. The mother, Harriet, earns a meager income selling bongs and she allows herself and her children to be blown in the wind like leaves. The father, Les, sells and smokes large volumes of marijuana and excels at avoiding responsibility. Eliza’s mother and Les’ girlfriend, Di, is a chapter out of Mommy Dearest. The only adult I can recall of character in the book is Ravi, the deceased’s long lost missing father, who eventually does the right thing only after being told to do so by Jude.
The character of Eliza is neglected by the author more so than the character is neglected by her own mother. The author has some detailed insights into experiencing pregnancy that, one assumes, can only be gleaned from enduring the experience. Other than that, the guys have all the fun and character development while poor Eliza is just along for the ride.
I enjoyed Ten-Thousand Saints and I found it hard to put down once I started reading it. I found myself caring for the characters, even the idiot adults. The book is a worthy love letter to the late 1980s and the people affected and blessed by the times.