The Every Boy [Paperback]

Dana Adam Shapiro (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 28, 2007

When fifteen-year-old Henry Every washes up on shore, the only clues to his shocking death are those he leaves behind in a secret ledger that someone mysteriously leaves on his parents' doorstep. Crammed full of his darkly comic confessions, the pages detail Henry's myriad misadventures on his wayward quest for self-betterment: acts of petty crime with his best friend, Jorden, a romantic obsession with the elusive Benna, and a prickly relationship with a lethal jellyfish. Quietly wise and laugh-out-loud funny, The Every Boy proves there's hope in the darkest places -- you just have to know where to look.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Henry Every, the titular boy in Shapiro's inventive but too precious debut novel, drowns under mysterious circumstances at the tender age of 15, leaving behind a mother who's a little obsessed with ant farms, a father devoted to his jellyfish and boxing, and five years' worth of diary entries written on 2,600 pages of loose-leaf graph paper. This "ledger... is... a catalog of life's wee tics and pangs... threadbare confessionals, overheard dialogue transcriptions, [and] stabs at investigative journalism." For his estranged parents, Hannah and Harlan, it's a window on the wacky inner life of a deeply (but quite happily) odd teenager. Henry's antics and observations are endearingly offbeat for the most part, but become cloying at times: in answer to the essay question "Who are you?" he "found himself starting at the Precambrian era and sifting through four and a half billion years worth of being." Though Shapiro serves up some wise, lovely characterizations (Henry's grandma Lulu, for example), the mostly light-and-sweet narrative stalls in moments of self-conscious precocity, when the author's fascination with Henry resembles a narcissistic adolescent crush. Film rights have been optioned by Plan B, with Shapiro, whose documentary Murderball won an Audience Award at Sundance this year, attached to write and direct.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"A sweet, melancholy first novel...so many young writers have been described as Salingeresque that it's a shock to come across one who actually fits the bill." --Tom Perotta, author of Little Children

"A terrific writer with an unerring sense of how confusing it is to be 15 years old." The New York Times Book Review

"A magical, haunting, hilarious debut." --Amy Sedaris

"Anything but ordinary...You could black out every other paragraph in The Every Boy and it would still outcharm Catcher in the Rye." TimeOut New York

"Perversely funny." The New York Daily News

"Henry's mid-novel trip to New York cements the inevitable Holden Caufield parallel, but given Shapiro's coporeal take on youthful alienation, Gregor Samsa might be just as relevant." The Village Voice

"Full of charm and eccentricity." The Arizona Republic

"True to his surname, Henry's confessions record his conflicted progress through the stations of adolescence, the agonies all young people suffer as they struggle with Big Issues of growing up: how to fit in without relinquishing the right to be different, how to know whom to trust and whom to love, how to forgive our parents for the unforgiveable things they do to us." Boston Globe

"Remarkably buoyant and witty...[and] unsentimentally perceptive and optimistic about the oddness and difficulty and even, sometimes, the joy of being a human among humans." --Matthew Sharpe, author of The Sleeping Father

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 211 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (February 28, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618773401
• ISBN-13: 978-0618773404
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,820,083 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A disarming, witty novel about a quirky 15-year-old boy's life story told posthumously, August 11, 2005

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Every Boy (Hardcover)

THE EVERY BOY by Dana Adam Shapiro is a slender and risky book. Its small size and decidedly short length --- just over 200 pages --- are misleading, perhaps purposefully so. One wouldn't think at first glance that the story of one boy's brief life, told after he has died, and the lives that he orbited during his short 15 years on the planet, would prove so full and ample. Yet the life of Henry Every was positively zaftig.

While Henry's propensity for quirky affectations and color-coded diary entries may incite readers to compare him to a certain Salinger protagonist, Henry is decidedly more optimistic. And while he often dons the cap of world-weariness, much of his delicately rendered observations are peppered with a kind of zany enthusiasm and almost child-like joy. Readers will have to decide for themselves which image of teenage boyhood rings truer, and while they may end up choosing Salinger's, Shapiro's is utterly disarming. Fifteen-year-olds with the sensitivity and awareness of Henry may be hard to come by, but we can still hold out hope that they exist.

Similarly, all the characters that flit through the pages of this novel are hopeful creations, so vivid and bizarre and wonderful that we can't help but hope they will leap off the page and into our worlds. Henry has a hard-drinking, gumbo-loving grandmother named Lulu who lives in a kind of perfect, symbiotic dysfunction with and her brash and fiery Cuban maid Papi; his Scandinavian mother cultivates ant-farms and mangles American platitudes, rendering them somehow truer; and the love of his short life, Benna, has only one hand.

These various personas are more than just amalgamations of quirks and oddities. Instead of splaying them on the page, reveling in their bizarre glory and his own cleverness in conceiving them, Shapiro treats each of his creations with a kind of sincere delicacy. Henry and his surreal world is not just a platform for Shapiro to demonstrate his wit and inventiveness; there is no hint of condescension or self-indulgence in his prose.

It is because we fall for Henry --- because we believe, perhaps despite ourselves, in his world --- that our knowledge of his inevitable demise does not sink the novel. And, as the events leading to Henry's death unfold, we simultaneously dip into the parallel story of his parents' tentative steps towards reconciliation, Lulu and Papi's manic love/hate dance, and Henry's own somewhat misguided, gentle and unfailingly hopeful stabs at being in love.

In this little book Shapiro asks readers to enter Henry's world with the wide-eyed hunger for the extraordinary that he as a writer and Henry as a character both display --- to soak up life's beautiful peculiarities. It may take a leap of faith on our part to allow ourselves to fall for this novel's charms, but in the end it is a vital risk to take. Indeed, Shapiro himself has demonstrated the importance, the value and the weight of small risks.

--- Reviewed by Jennifer Krieger

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Refreshing, Funny, Suspenseful, Pure Pleasure of a Read, June 22, 2005

By 

Marc Grobler (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Every Boy (Hardcover)

I was not sure what to expect from this book, but after reading it, I am hoping a second Novel is not too far behind. The story is told in a unique and refreshing style; I could not wait to get home from work to read it and it pained me to put it down to go to sleep. I highly recommend this book.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Better than "Salingeresque", June 26, 2005

By 

Sandy Sanchez "Sandra Shwayder Sanchez" (Nederland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Every Boy (Hardcover)

I hope I won't be accused of heresy if I say that Henry Every is more intriquing and more insightful than Holden Caulfield. Having enjoyed Henry so much, I wish he were alive for a sequel. Since that is not the case, perhaps the author will treat his readers to a next book featuring the inimitable Jorden. She is a standout among a cast of well drawn and fascinating characters.