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Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock
Author:
Quick, Matthew
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Class:
Fiction
Age: 14-19
Language: English
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LC: PZ7
Grade: 9-12
Print Run: 40000
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ISBN-13: 9780316221337
LCCN: 2012031410
Imprint: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
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Pub Date: 08/13/2013
Availability: Out of Stock Indefinitely
List: $18.00
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Hardcover
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Physical Description:
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273 pages ; 22 cm
H 8.75",
W 6",
D 1",
0.9 lbs.
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LC Series:
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Brodart Sources:
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Brodart's For Youth Interest: Popular
Brodart's Insight Catalog: Teen
Brodart's TOP Young Adult Titles
Brodart's YA Reads for Adults
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Bibliographies:
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Nevada Young Readers' Award Winners
Senior High Core Collection, 19th ed.
Senior High Core Collection, 20th ed.
Senior High Core Collection, 21st ed.
Senior High Core Collection, 22nd ed.
Texas Tayshas Reading List
Young Adult Fiction Core Collection, 4th ed.
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Awards:
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Best Fiction for Young Adults
Horn Book Guide Titles, Rated 1 - 4
Publishers Weekly Annual Best Books Selections
Publishers Weekly Starred Reviews
School Library Journal Starred Reviews
VOYA's 5Q Picks
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Starred Reviews:
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Publishers Weekly
School Library Journal
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TIPS Subjects:
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Problem Novel
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BISAC Subjects: |
YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Social Themes / Sexual Abuse
YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Social Themes / Depression
YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Social Themes / Suicide
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LC Subjects:
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Suicide, Fiction
Suicide, Juvenile fiction
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SEARS Subjects: |
Suicide, Fiction
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Reading Programs: |
Accelerated Reader Level:
5.9
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Points: 9.0
Lexile Level:
980
Reading Counts Level:
8.3
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Points: 14.0
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| Annotations |
| Brodart's TOP Young Adult Titles | 08/01/2013 |
| The day Leonard Peacock was born shall be the day that he dies. This is his wish as he prepares to kill his former best friend and commit suicide. Before he pulls the trigger, Leonard bids special farewells to the four who have meant the world to him. 288pp. |
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| Starred Reviews: |
| Publishers Weekly | 06/24/2013 |
| Ages 15-up. Quick's books typically revolve around characters who don't fit in, don't understand their place in the world, and face daunting obstacles. Leonard Peacock is another such individual, a teenager who feels let down by adults and out of step with his sheeplike classmates. Foreseeing only more unhappiness and disappointment in life (and harboring a secret that's destroying him), Leonard packs up his grandfather's WWII handgun and heads to school, intending to kill his former best friend and then himself. First, though, he will visit the important people in his life: an elderly cinephile neighbor, a musically gifted classmate, the teacher of his Holocaust studies class, and a homeschooled girl who passes out religious tracts in the train station. Quick's attentiveness to these few key relationships and encounters gives the story its strength and razorlike focus. Its greatest irony is that, despite Leonard's commitment to his murder-suicide plan, he appreciates and values life in a way that few do. Through Leonard, Quick urges readers to look beyond the pain of the here and now to the possibilities that await. Agent: Douglas Stewart, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Aug.). 288p. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, c2013. |
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| School Library Journal | 08/01/2013 |
| Gr 10 Up. Leonard Peacock has big plans for his 18th birthday. He plans to kill Asher Beal and then commit suicide. Leonard is a loner, an outcast, a misfit. Asher is a superpopular jock/bully. But they used to be friends, best friends. Something happened when they were 12, something bad. Leonard has had no one to confide in-his washed-up rock-musician dad is on the lam and his self-absorbed, oblivious mother forgets that she has a son. His anger, emotional pain, and brokenness build until he feels there is nothing left to do but end his life and the cause of his misery. As he gives gifts to the four people who mean something to him, he reveals some of his anguish. One recipient, his teacher Herr Silverman, picks up on his suicidal signals and offers the listening ear Leonard so desperately needs. As the heartbreaking climax unfolds, readers learn about the sexual and emotional trauma the teen has endured. Fortunately, there is no bloodshed, just the shedding of many overdue tears. Leonard knows he needs help and readers will hope he gets it. This is a difficult, yet powerful, book. Quick's use of flashbacks, internal dialogue, and interpersonal communication is brilliant, and the suspense about what happened between Leonard and Asher builds tangibly. The masterful writing takes readers inside Leonard's tormented mind, enabling a compassionate response to him and to others dealing with trauma. May there be more Herr Silvermans willing to take personal risks to save the Leonard Peacocks. Lisa Crandall, formerly at the Capital Area District Library, Holt, MI. 280p. SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL, c2013. |
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| Journal Reviews |
| BookPage | 08/01/2013 |
| Ages 12-up. Matthew Quick may be best known for The Silver Linings Playbook and the Oscar-winning movie it inspired, but he's never really stopped being a teacher. Writing for teens simply lets him send his intended messages to a wider audience. "If you care about kids," he says, "teaching is the hardest job in the world." In Quick's new YA novel, Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock, Leonard plans to celebrate his 18th birthday by using an old Nazi handgun to kill his former best friend and then himself. But first he has gifts to deliver to the four people who mean the most to him: an elderly neighbor with whom he trades Humphrey Bogart quotes; a classmate whose violin music soothes him; his completely out-of-reach crush; and his Holocaust studies teacher, Herr Silverman, who plays a crucial role as Leonard draws closer to what may be his final act. Just as Leonard carefully chooses whom to trust with his secrets, Herr Silverman must decide what he's willing to do to help a student in need. "I really wanted to show that conflict," Quick says in a call from his Massachusetts home. "When you have to grade 80 five-paragraph essays for kids trying to get into Harvard, and some kid comes to you with some type of crisis and is crying, which do you choose? Do you comfort that kid or do you grade the essays? Or do you comfort the kid and grade the essays and tell your wife you can't go out that weekend? I wanted to set up that relationship as something that was challenging. When is it time to break down those boundaries, play loose with the rules? How far do you go?" Helping these students can save their lives, but as Leonard's favorite teacher learns, it can also create a set of ethical questions without any easy answers. "You can't put a price tag on empathy." Quick--who left his job as a high school English teacher in New Jersey to pursue an MFA in creative writing--understands that teens want to be on equal footing with their adult teachers while still needing them to be dependable authority figures. Connections between teachers and students matter--and linger. Quick tells an anecdote about a lonely student who once approached him for advice. Quick told the young man, "You don't know who you're going to meet in five years. Your best friend could be out there, your life partner could be in some other high school, having all the same issues and the same problems--you don't know who they are yet, but you'll meet that person eventually." Quick soon forgot about the conversation, but his student didn't. Eight years later, the former student returned to introduce Quick to his wife and told him, "You were right about that." Quick was touched. "The things we tell teenagers are powerful," he says. "They remember." So why did Quick leave the classroom for writing? Several reasons, he says, including returning to an earlier passion and "knowing how to find balance." During his own teen years, Quick was discouraged from pursuing a career in writing, as it was considered "unmanly" in his blue-collar hometown. But Quick found that teaching, counseling, coaching and chaperoning left little time for writing--or anything else. Becoming a full-time author made him feel "fully alive" while also providing for himself and his family. Leaving teaching was a risk, but one that paid off. Along with The Silver Linings Playbook, Quick is now the author of three books for young adults and the upcoming adult novel The Good Luck of Right Now, set to be published by HarperCollins in 2014. And since the success of The Silver Linings Playbook, he's found himself with more readers, sales, translations and speaking engagements than he ever expected. "But that's not why I write," Quick emphasizes. Instead, what drives his novels is the... Review exceeds allowable length. 288pg. BOOKPAGE, c2013. |
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| Booklist | 08/01/2013 |
| Grades 8-11. It's Leonard's eighteenth birthday and, big surprise, nobody remembered. This birthday, however, is going to count--because Leonard plans to shoot cruel bully (and former best friend) Asher Beal after school. First, though, there is the small matter of gift giving, in which Leonard delivers four presents to the four people who made his "worthless" life a little better: a noir film-loving neighbor, a violin prodigy classmate, a superhot teen evangelist, and his favorite teacher. The single-day time frame provides a good deal of claustrophobic tension, as readers will hope against hope that one of these four people will be able to deflect Leonard from his mission. But this is far from a thriller; Quick is most interested in Leonard's psychology, which is simultaneously clear and splintered, and his voice, which is filled with brash humor, self-loathing, and bucket loads of refreshingly messy contradictions, many communicated through Leonard's footnotes to his own story. It may sound bleak, but it is, in fact, quite brave, and Leonard's interspersed fictional notes to himself from 2032 add a unique flavor of hope. Kraus, Daniel. 280p. AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, c2013. |
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| Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books | 10/01/2013 |
| R. Gr. 7-10. Not only can Leonard Peacock recite most of Hamlet, in many ways, he is Hamlet, and he has decided that today is the day when he will answer the ultimate question of to be or not to by killing himself (and his former best friend). His only remaining friend is an older neighbor with whom he watches Bogart movies, but he has also formed one-sided attachments to an Iranian immigrant in his high school who allows him to listen to him play violin as long as he doesn't talk to him, a fundamentalist Christian girl who hands out tracts at the subway station, and his history teacher, Herr Silverman, who hides a secret under his sleeve. These are the people Leonard wants to interact with on his last day on earth, but as each encounter leads him closer to his fatal plans, he realizes that he can't orchestrate the day as elegantly as he'd like, and his disappointments lead to reflections, both comforting and tragic, on what brought him to this day. Leonard's story is in some measure predictable for the genre, with intemperate swipes at a caricatured Christianity and a home situation that begs intervention from social services, but his narrative voice is utterly convincing, and his letters to himself from the future, an assignment Herr Silverman has devised to help him realize that a future is possible, are an effective intervention. Hamlet may be Leonard's muse, but Holden Caulfield is his mentor; he's a bright, articulate, thoughtful, deeply sad young man in desperate need of adults for whom life is actually working even when it's difficult. Fortunately, he has two-Herr Silverman and his neighbor-who provide very different kinds of support in this compelling reminder that there's an adult light at the end of the teenaged tunnel. KC. 278p. THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE UNIV. OF ILLINOIS, c2013. |
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| Horn Book | 07/01/2013 |
| High School. Eighteen-year-old Leonard Peacock used to be "boring, nice, and normal." Now, he's packing a P-38 WWII Nazi handgun and planning to kill his former best friend Asher, then himself. Leonard claims that Asher has become "the closest modern-day equivalent of a Nazi that we have at my high school," a boy who has so damaged Leonard's life that Leonard sees no future with himself (or Asher) in it. "Show me it's possible to be an adult and also be happy," Leonard says, yearning to know if growing up is worth it, though he figures it isn't. "Herr Silverman," Leonard's Holocaust class teacher, who, mysteriously, never rolls up his shirtsleeves, may be the light in Leonard's darkness, perhaps able to prove "how powerful a weapon being different can be." Over the course of one intense day (with flashbacks), Leonard's existential crisis is delineated through an engaging first-person narrative supplemented with footnotes and letters from the future that urge Leonard to believe in a "life beyond the ubermorons" at school. Complicated characters and ideas remain complicated, with no facile resolutions, in this memorable story. dean schneider. 279pg. THE HORN BOOK, c2013. |
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| Horn Book Guide | 05/01/2014 |
| 2. Eighteen-year-old Leonard Peacock is packing a hand-gun and planning to kill his former best friend, then himself. Over the course of one intense day (with flashbacks), Leonard's existential crisis is delineated through an engaging first-person narrative supplemented with letters from the future that urge Leonard to believe in a "life beyond the ubermorons" at school. Complicated characters and ideas mark this memorable story. Review 7/13. ds. 279pg. THE HORN BOOK, c2014. |
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| Kirkus Reviews | 06/15/2013 |
| A teen boy with a World War II pistol in hand is bent on murder and suicide. Leonard Peacock has big plans for his birthday: He's cut his longish hair down to the scalp, wrapped some going-away presents for his friends and tucked his grandfather's souvenir Nazi-issue P-38 pistol into his backpack. He's off to school, but he plans to make some pit stops along the way to see his friends, including his elderly, Bogart-obsessed neighbor. After he gives his gifts away, he'll murder Asher Beal, another boy at school. Then he'll off himself. To say Quick's latest is dark would be an understatement: Leonard is dealing with some serious issues and comes across as a resolutely heartless killer in the first few pages. As the novel progresses and readers learn more, however, his human side and heart rise to the surface and tug at readers' heartstrings. The work has its quirks. Footnotes run amok, often telling more story than the actual narrative, and some are so long that readers might forget what's happening in the story as they read the footnote. Some readers will eat this up, but others will find it endlessly distracting. Other structural oddities include letters written by Leonard to himself from the future; they seem to make no sense at first, but readers find out later that his teacher recommended he write them to cope with his depression. Despite these eccentricities, the novel presents a host of compelling, well-drawn, realistic characters--all of whom want Leonard to make it through the day safe and sound. An artful, hopeful exploration of a teen boy in intense need. (Fiction. 14 & up). 288pg. KIRKUS MEDIA LLC, c2013. |
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| ~VOYA (Voice of Youth Advocates Magazine - Retired Journal) | 08/01/2013 |
| 5Q 3P S. Leonard Peacock hopes that on the day he turns eighteen, his mother will call and wish him a happy birthday. She does not, and no one else does either, so Leonard moves forward with his plan for the day: to kill his former best friend, Asher Beal, and then himself with his grandfather's P-38 Nazi pistol. Before he does the deed, he brings gifts to the four people in his life who give it meaning, and slowly reveals the secrets that have brought him to this point. Leonard never stops hoping that someone or something will make him change his mind about his murder-suicide path and that he will be able to be happy. The first couple chapters leave the reader wondering if Leonard is a likable or redeemable character. The first two "Letters from the Future" leave the reader slightly confused. But soon after, the pieces of Leonard's life come together and his sympathetic points are clear. Quick's writing is of a high caliber, every word has a purpose, and the ending is both heartbreaking and hopeful. The swearing, discussion of rape, and Leonard's violent plans make this a heavy read for many teen readers, but those who need a healthy way to address these topics or are mature enough to handle them will find this a quality read.--Deena Viviani. 288p. VOICE OF YOUTH ADVOCATES, c2013. |
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9780316221337,dl.it[0].title
| Review Citations |
| New York Times Book Review | 08/25/2013 |
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