{"product_id":"9780618433216","title":"The Sparkling-Eyed Boy: A Memoir of Love, Grown Up","description":"\u003cbr\u003e\"The Sparkling-Eyed Boy is so full of color and light and life.\" -- Brad Land, author of Goat\u003cp\u003eThe theme of summer love, in Amy Benson's hands, grows up: The Sparkling-Eyed Boy searches out the fault lines of adult nostalgia and desire. The achingly intense adolescent summer days that Amy Benson and the sparkling-eyed boy spend together on the remote shores of the St. Mary's River of Michigan's Upper Peninsula are at the complex emotional center of The Sparkling-Eyed Boy. For her, summers meant returning from her home in Detroit to a three-month idyll on much-loved family land, owned for generations, and to a heady culture of teasing, testing local boys. For him, this land is the place he was born, where he'll later find work, marry, and stay: and she was the one he had loved.\u003cbr\u003e \"Can you pinpoint that moment? When you made a choice before you even knew that choosing was possible, or the terrifying nature of choices?\" The Sparkling-Eyed Boy, with its heart-stoppingly erotic -- and yet wholly imagined -- scenes of illicit love, its searching riffs on love as possession, love as pain, reads like a friend's deepest secrets, shared.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“The Sparkling-Eyed Boy is so full of color and light and life. This is truth of the most profound sort; truth revealed in the artful and lyrical sensibility of Benson’s words and memory. She is dancing with us: not leading, but simply asking us to watch her move and take what we will. Benson shows us here what the memoir can and should do — destroy and resurrect itself over and over. Benson is doing exactly that.” — Brad Land, author of Goat \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“The great pleasure and triumph of this memoir is Amy Benson’s ability to make the familiar new again as she explores the country of first love. Over and over I found myself surprised by the unexpected twists and turns, peaks and abysses, of her journey. And also by her lovely, fiercely intelligent prose.” — Margot Livesey, author of Criminals\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Houghton Mifflin Harcourt","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47820278464752,"sku":"9780618433216","price":14.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780618433216_p0.jpg?v=1763602545","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780618433216","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}