Customer Reviews

Entering Ephesus

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I read this coming-of-age story more than twenty years ago, when I was coming of age. It has left vivid images of life on what we would now call the nerdly fringes of adolescent society in a mid-Southern university town. I remember a boy walking along railroad tracks, thinking about his worn corduroy pants and deciding that he was above caring what the unenlightened might think of him. I remember an out-of-touch mother who found creative outlet in designing eccentric dresses for her daughters to wear on their first day of school in a new town. Being too close in development to the subjects at the time, the book's meaning washed over me, but its images have come to me from time-to-time as memories of a strange encounter. It is a powerful portrayal of adolescence.

I read this book when it first was published in 1971 and my old copy is now falling apart because I thumb through it so often to help me with my own writing. It's a vivid, compelling, hilarious and heartbreaking portrait of a family uprooted after losing their house in the depression -- and it's still relevant more than 25 years after being published. That's what makes a classic....