Customer Reviews

A Boy I Once Knew: What a Teacher Learned from her Student

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

For me, this book highlighted the idea that we never fully realize the impact we have on others who pass in and out of our lives. As his school English teacher, Elizabeth Stone obviously had a great influence on Vincent - one that stayed with him his entire life. But only after his death, when she received his diary journals, did she begin to comprehend her power in his life. Then Vincent, in what has to be one of the most beautiful - yet unintended - gestures, reciprocated by becoming teacher to Ms. Stone in her quest to deal with some very major life issues. This is not a story about AIDS, death or an individual life. It's about our connections with each other and how we never fully know the impact we have on another human being.

When I first considered reading this book I said to myself "Oh, no - not another AIDS memoir!" having read at least a dozen and lived through the 80's and 90's in the San Francisco ground-zero of AIDS.

Elizabeth Stone's "A Boy I Once Knew" is something much more - a rare kind of memoir and memory game in one package. Here is a middle-aged New Jersey mother of two teenage sons in 2001 remembering a 14 yr. old student, Vincent, she briefly knew in Brooklyn 25 years earlier in the process of discovering him anew through his diaries as he grows into a 40 year old man about to die of AIDS in San Francisco in 1995. Ms. Stone ferries the reader through these dizzying time zones and locations with reflections on grief, discovery, death, illness and aging in her own family, relationships to her parents, children and husband as well as her role as teacher, mother and daughter. Reading this book is somewhat like reading a mystery where we know the beginning and the end but read to find out about the more nuanced matters in the middle. Two people become astoundingly revealed here: Vincent both through his own words and the author's recreation of him and the author through her dazzling insights into herself and her subject.

This was a totally absorbing read; I couldn't put it down and finished it within 24 hours of when I started. I disagree with the other reviewers who wanted more about Vincent; this is fundamentally Elizabeth Stone's story, as well it should be. There was a ton of food for thought here, especially in the idea of the "relationships" we actively carry on with people who have left our lives, whether due to death or just diverging life paths. The book is back on my shelf, but still in my mind.

A Boy I Once Knew is a bit of a miss-titled novel. Although the book is an interesting read, I was expecting a book about the title character and his life journey from the time he was a student to the time he died. Instead, the book focuses primarily on the author who draws parallels between what is happening in the Journals to what is happening in her own life. While sometimes interesting. In that sense it was disappointing, leaving me to wonder about the diaries and what I didn't learn. A more apt title for this book might have been, The Diaries I Received From A Student And How They Made Me Reflect On My Own Life.

While I really enjoyed "A boy i once knew" I wish it was more about the boy. The novel does follow the live of Vincent and his diaries but it lacks a true sense of who he was. Oh we get plenty about his life, where he went, and his death but I didn't connect with Vincent as much as I did with the AUTHOR. Now this isn't a bad thing at all. Overall the book is really great but I learned more about the author and I got to know her more than I did about the books main character. Was this intentional? I don't think so but if you haven't read the book yet, when you do, try to look at the bigger picture: a teachers own self exploration vicariously through her students' diaries. Very well written and again I enjoyed it very much.

What a tremendous letdown! I picked this up because I loved the thought of the ex-teacher revealing the life of a former student through his memoirs and her memories. Too bad that isn't really the book. Elizabeth Stone uses Vincent as an excuse to write her own autobiography- and believe me, her story makes you long to hear Vincent's all the more. Perhaps his diaries were very vague or his family reticent of having his life detailed - both understandable. But, given that, there isnlt really a worthwhile project here. I got so bored that I kept skipping pages looking to find Vincent's story and all I really kept finding was hers. Ugh! A vanity project all around.

Upon completing this book (and before reading the reviews of others on this site), I came out with many of the same feelings that they had: this book was NOT so much about the "Boy" but about the author. I'm glad to see that I wasn't the only one disappointed and misled by the book and its summary. I wanted to know more about the supposed title character...not about the author. The author left his diaries and notes to a total stranger so she could tell the world about him...about his battle with life...and death. And yet all she was concerned about was her own life. What a disappointment. I'm sure she gained something from reading his diaries, but we certainly didn't. And when she did mention him, she used quotes from his diaries that were quick notes like, "Went shopping. Met with friend." Nothing in detail. A true author who wanted to share Vincent with the world would have cut beyond his quick notes and written something with more depth, using his notes as a guide. Ms. Stone didn't seem to even "get" Vincent...or the gay lifestyle. So, after reading the book, I quickly resold it online. It wasn't a keeper for me. Sorry, Vincent...I hope someone else preserves memories of you...

An unusually intriguing, hard-to-categorize book. Yes, the book is engrossing and well written, but it is the basic idea of the book - how someone who's dead emerges from a UPS package and, over time, lovingly muscles his way into the minds of the author and the reader - that stays with you. There is a kind of parabola in Vincent's life - alive, dead, and back to life again - that is fascinating. And the intersection of Vincent's curve with Stone's struggle to come to terms with these issues in her own life adds depth and universality to the story. I found myself nodding again and again as I ran into Stone's (or Vincent's) offhand insights on living and dying.

Vincent, a young man from Brooklyn, discovers he's gay, moves to San Francisco, develops AIDS, and dies thousands of miles from his parents and sisters, in the bosom of a chosen family of friends.

This book helps the reader get to know Vincent through the sympathetic eyes of his high school English teacher, Elizabeth Stone. She hasn't seen him in 20 years, but they've exchanged Christmas cards every year, and when Vincent dies, he bequeaths his diaries to her.

Vincent had hopes that his diaries could be made into a literary work, but the excerpts included in this book make clear that he was no literary stylist. After a memorable experience, he was as likely to tuck a leaf or a ticket stub into his diary as he was to compose a paragraph in it. He often wrote in sentence fragments.

Fortunately, ten years of leaves and ticket stubs and sentence fragments reveal Vincent in all his humanity. Stone's contribution is to interpret the diaries and make sense of them in the context of the rest of her life experiences.

In dying, Vincent joined more than 500,000 U.S. citizens (and countless millions of non-U.S. citizens) who have succumbed to AIDS. Thanks to this book, he is no statistic. He was decent, lonely, starving for emotional contact: an aspiring filmmaker and a thoughtful giver of gifts.

Elizabeth Stone is a literary stylist bearing gifts of her own. Together, she and Vincent made this thoughtful, insightful, and memorable book for you.

A large brown box appears on the doorstep of teacher, Elizabeth Stone's front door. Inside she would find the journals and inner workings of former student, former human being, former AIDS patient; Vincent.
This book was extremely slow going. I felt that it asked too may questions and sort of implied the story rather than to tell it. Yes I am aware that Miss. Stone only had the journals as a reference yet I still believe this work could have been executed in a way as to end up with a much more impressive piece of writing.
In reading "A Boy I Once Knew," I also came across a variety of typos and errors thus proving the type of effort that went into the book.
Stone also seemed to focus much more on her life than Vincent's, the one she meant to be preserved.
When I look at this book as a whole I can't help but wonder if Vincent was made into the person he wanted the world to know. But, at the same time, I don't know if we were properly "introduced".