Customer Reviews

Downers Grove

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

Like some of the other reviewers,I grew up in DG for 20 years(in fact,parents still live there) and picked up the book partly out of curiousity to see how my hometown was portrayed. The plot and characters are a bit undeveloped thus you don't feel any true connection building between yourself and the book. The pop culture references ala Prince imply that this was supposed to take place in the 80s(the decade I went to Downers Grove South High)but then throws in the "Kurt & Courtney"movie,an obvious 90s reference. I really felt like the book was a poor man's "Catcher in the Rye" than anything else. Maybe I'm just getting old but the teens were just amazingly whiny.

The thing that bugged me were the glaring mistakes about not only the town Downers and its teens but Chicago,in general. When writers research their material,they usually go into a comprehensive sojourn for accuracy. This is where Hornburg slips. Everyone in both the city and suburbs know that North Ave runs east-west,not north-south. Wicker Park is mispelled "Whicker". Bolingbrook is mispelled "Bowling Brook". While Downers Grove has about 3 movie theatres(the Tivoli being the oldest while the others are newer and are in strip malls)none of them would've ever shown anything as edgy as "Kurt and Courtney' .That's what the Music Box,Piper's Alley and Facets Multimedia in the city's for. And why did Hornburg feel the need to make Lemont Rd and Main St two separate roads? THEY'RE THE SAME STREET! As big as Downers Grove is,Hornburg chose to focus on most of the events between the train station,63rd and 75th streets. This would be fine if he sometimes didn't make Downers sound like a tiny one stoplight town. My biggest beef was,hands down, the portrayal of Downers Grove youth. Contrary to Hornburg's vision,we weren't all stoners,slackers and disaffected. Sure,we hung out,drove all around town keeping the local cops on their toes but since 1986 almost every DG teen,at one time or another,makes the White Castle on 75th and Lemont part of their weekend hangout ritual. And absolutely NO teen from Downers Grove or the neighboring town Westmont has never not spent a late night at Omega Restaurant(With the very proud almost cocky slogan"Often copied,never duplicated"practically branded on its huge sign) Really,it's these personal touches that would've made the book a slightly better read and a more vivd blast from the past for its residents,now and then. It's a pretty quick read(I knocked it out in 3 hours)and,all in all,is light fare for what it is. Do yourself a favor and wait for the paperback,better yet,save your dough and check it out from the library.

In attempting to tell the story of Chrissie Swanson -- a young woman who as a highschool senior has little hope for a glorious future -- Michael Hornburg fails.

He wishes to present Chrissie as a potentially clever yet deeply cynical person. Unfortunately, most of her narration is nothing but a ridiculous collection of mixed metaphors and shallow, failed attempts at insight.

A character without depth does not usually work well as the central figure in a novel. And it would be the job of an author with far more skill than Hornburg to write such a novel.

As for plot, this novel is dreadfully unoriginal and the story contains so many warmed-over plot elements and tired episodes that unwarranted attention is drawn to the author's lack of skill. It is one thing to present a situation which we've seen before -- in fiction or in our own life -- but to do so without giving a fresh perspective or meaningful context? Why should an author bother?

Hornburg's failure extends so far as to miss important elements regarding the locale of his novel. Now, I'm all for poetic license...but when several other weaknesses in a novel are accompanied by a slip-shod handling of the details which are supposed to provide realism, my estimation of an author is not going to improve.

Certainly, as a resident of the Chicago area who is familiar with the setting of this novel, I may know some things that the general reader does not. So, I'm not going to make a big deal about this.

But even without regard to that, any reader who wants an intelligent, well-written novel to read should not bother with this.

I was a girl graduating from High School in Downers Grove in 1999. I should be able to relate to Chrissy.

Frankly, I am disgusted. This is an awful novel. I am offended by the geographic inaccuracies, the unabashedly ridiculous personalities, and the fact Hornburg considered spending an hour flipping through his 1970s yearbook as "research."

I hate that I spent a few hours of my life reading this book. There was nothing redeeming about it; more often than not, it was an embarrassment. I wish that I could give this book zero stars. This dockle owes Downers Grove an apology. Actually, Downers Grove is not that great (though not as bad as he says).

Hornburg owes *me* an apology. I really wanted to like this book.

I really wanted to like this book. It was recommended to me and I read the back and got excited. However, as soon as I started it, I knew something was wrong. I couldn't get a clear picture of any of the characters, and only saw a middle-aged guy trying to present teenage girls by using embarrassingly inappropriate pop-culture references. I never figured out what kind of girls Chrissie and Tracy were really supposed to be. Were they generic teenyboppers obsessed with hair and makeup? Counter-cultural punk/alternative/goth outcasts? Sharp-witted critics of society? My confusion began when Chrissie said that Tracy got her into hair and stuff like that, but also "started [her] as a vegan," which didn't seem realistic for either one of their characters, and which ended up making the author sound particularly stupid considering Chrissie went on to talk about all the milk she put in her coffee and oatmeal (vegans don't eat dairy products).

I read the whole thing in a few hours because I was curious as to whether it might get better. It didn't. Its plot was slightly intriguing for a second, because I wanted to know whether the girls would die or go to jail. It wasn't until I finished the whole thing that I realized that there hadn't been any character development or plot development...at the end, I still didn't have a grasp on who the girls were or what they had been through (except in a vague, generic way), I didn't believe in Chrissie's relationship with Bobby at all, and I wondered why the mom and brother had even been put into the book in the first place, considering they were just one-sided cardboard cutouts in the background. Actually, that's pretty much what all of the characters were except for Chrissie, who was too contradictory to be one-sided.

Apparently, this author doesn't know that throwing in a few names of 90s rock bands, trying to describe teenage girl fashion in great detail and using the word "mosh" are not substitutes for creating likeable, realistic characters or writing a story that doesn't read like a montage of bad generic teenage romance, action and horror films.

I am a huge fan of young adult fiction novels and am usually not that picky or critical of them. I guess I hadn't read a really bad one until now.

Fie on suburbanites! Woe and misery to all who live on or near a cul-de-sac! Rot for all eternity in backwater, white-trash hellpits like Downers Grove!

Chrissie and her friend Tracy are stuck in stereotypical Midwestern suburbia surrounded by all that is ripe for contempt. School's almost out and both girls are hoping to graduate. And after all the wild parties, car chases, and casual sex, the two girls learn...nothing. They don't change at all. There is no realization, no bright epiphany to drive the story. There's just a long string of idle conversation and a whole lot of comparisons. "The astronaut was as far away from Dad as Jell-O is to mashed potatoes." "...she shined like a quarter found under a couch cushion." "The problem with jocks is they're as interchangeable as a lightbulb." Craving more? You've found your dream book.

Mr Hornburg should have chosen a fictional town about which to write, as this book bears no resemblance to the actual Downers Grove of the 1990's. The author clearly spent little time researching the Chicago suburbs, and in deciding to write about an actual place, Hornburg should have gotten the facts straight. The Far West suburbs are no longer a string of farm towns littering Chicago's backyard. My familiarity with the area is greater than the average reader's, but that doesn't excuse the liberties that were taken. Major geographical mistakes are made throughout the book, and the increase of misspellings and grammatical errors in the final chapters leads me to believe that even the proofreaders couldn't stomach any more of this attempt at teenage coming-of-angst.

Chrissie and Tracy are supposed to be exaggerated versions of teenaged girls, but their language and actions go way over the top into sheer unbelievablilty. Other reviewers have praised Hornburg for his keen ability to get inside a teenaged girl's head, but I disagree. I attended and later taught high school in Dupage County (where Downers Grove is located) and the level of mayhem and irrationality shown in the characters of Chrissie and Tracy doesn't fit the geography. As a former teenaged girl, Hornburg didn't successfully get into my head or the heads of any of the other teenaged girls I knew. The other characters (Chrissie's drugged-up brother, David, her desperately clueless mother, and her love interest, Bobby the trailer-trash mechanic)are equally overblown and uninteresting. With no character development, the story drags aimlessly and painfully on to an anti-climactic ending.

To sum it up, this is a lousy book. If you like characters with no redeeming qualities, appreciate a thin plot that goes nowhere, and revel in an overabundance of pointless and often nonsensical similes and metaphors, then you'll enjoy Hornburg's Downers Grove.

At a time when fiction offers more women writers than ever before, it is ironic that such an honest and poetic account of the life of a 17 year-old girl should be written by a 30-something man. Perhaps being liberated from biology and the tenets of 90's feminism allow Hornburg to explore his heroine's life more fully, illustrating a search for meaning that is universal.

From the first sentence, we see Chrissie yearning to be transfigured, to rise above the vacuum of her fast food, styrofoam existence. She tries sex, drugs, and rock and roll (the standard vehicles for today's youth) to escape her suburban Inferno. In the end, she chooses not to escape, but to be herself, even if it means wearing a Dairy Queen uniform. If for nothing else, the message that what is important is not how much you matter to the world, but how much the world matters to you, is reason enough to read this book. One of the functions of literature is to allow us to intimately connect with another life, and in a time when teenagers are more and more marginalized and isolated, having a friend like Chrissie could be very valuable indeed.

This has to be one of the worst books I've ever read. Everything in it is a bad stereotype and the whole thing reads like a commercial. I find it incredibly amusing how "hip" the author tries to play himself off, all the while carrying on a totally unbelievable and rambling story.

The angst-ridden lead character spends her time at Starbucks and Barnes and Noble, afterwards her and her friends go to see the movie Kurt and Courtney and then get their noses pierced. Come on!

If you want a real tale of depressed youth, read Catcher in the Rye or the Bell Jar, don't waste your time with this!

I read this book probably 5 or 6 years ago and I have to say it is one of the most memorable I have ever read. I try to read at least 20 books per year so in the past ten years there have been many....and this one I keep remembering. Unfortunately, the reasons I remember it are not positive. I remember this standing out as one of the worst books I have ever read. In fact, when posed the question, "What is the worst book you have ever read?" This was the one which sprung to mind and I had to come read reviews and see what others thought. When reading some of the five star reviews, where people ACTUALLY compare this drivel to "Catcher in the Rye," I literally felt sick to my stomach.

I remember this book as being completely unrealistic. Maybe there are some grown men who are capable of getting inside the head of a teenage girl, but in my opinion, Michael Hornburg is obviously not one of them. The protagonist's name is Crystal Methedrine. It's absolutely ludicrous. She is described throughout the book as having a "grunge" sort of personality...Wearing Doc Martens, talking of coloring her hair unconventional colors, going to see a movie about Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love...yet who is this sporty, all-American cheerleader type on the cover? You never know who Chrissie is supposed to BE, and what's more, you don't really care! For me, good character development is critical to a good book, and this one is woefully lacking in that area.

With a line like that, one would think that Hornburg would be coming out with something original in his tale of teenage maturing. He doesn't. The protagonist, Crystal Methedrine Swanson, holds only a unique name. Her narrative is dull and lifeless, stammering and stuttering through teenage tedium without any background or emotion to light her path.

Chrissie stumbles her way through the final fragments of her senior year at high school, a school cursed with having at least one death before every graduation. Haunted by a gang of pissed off jocks and flirting with a mechanic almost twice her age, Chrissie narrates her life as interestingly as sneezing into a Kleenex. (one peek and toss it into the trash)

If you're still interested, I recommend checking it out from the local library rather than paying money for this slow-moving, uninteresting romp through a forgettable town and a real downer of a protagonist.

I could predict EVERY plot twist and character in this novel way before it happened. It has the stereotypical and gendered presence of a particularly pathetic "edgy" teen movie. The brother's a junkie! (of course, he's a boy, so he has a shred of dignity; had they had a girl junkie, she would have been depicted as a pathetic degraded prostitute). The best friend's a trollop! (have I ever read a book about a teenage girl without there being the presence of a lame frigid yet "boy crazy" best friend?) The 'offbeat' (yeah, right) girl character has a crazy name!!! Basically, this book's depiction of twitty lame girls and evil men was more of a cliche than some anti-porn rant by Andrea Dworkin.