Publisher's Synopsis
Fans of McCammon's A BOY'S LIFE and Bradbury's SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES will be certain to enjoy this coming-of-age novella from John Boden.
1983: A boy and his little brother wander through a loosely stitched summer. A summer full of sun and surrealism, Lessons of loss and love. Of growing up and figuring it out. Nestled in the mountains of Pennsylvania is a small town, it's not like the others. Things are strange there- people die but hang around, pets too. Everyone knows your name and sometimes, a thing as simple as a movie coming to the local theatre, is all it takes to keep you going.
PRAISE FOR JEDI SUMMER
"Jedi Summer drops the floor right out from under you, leaves you standing in a childhood that's been roiling around inside your chest for too long. But you'd trade anything to stay there just one more day."
- Stephen Graham Jones, author of Mongrels and After The People Lights Have Gone Off
"[I] could not put it down. It moved me more than any novel in recent memory. Highly, highly, highly recommended, and I'm almost certain it will be one of the ten best books I'll read this year. Mark my words -- John Boden is a writer you're going to want to read so that five years from now, when everyone is raving about him, you can say, "Oh, I've been reading him for years."
- Brian Keene, award winning author of the The Rising, Pressure, and The Complex
"An exercise in fractured nostalgia, John Boden's Jedi Summer is the work of a writer strongly attuned to the wonders and horrors of the world: here are fond reminiscences, wistful longings, aching regrets, and corners teeming with dark shadows. The unexplained is woven throughout. There are witches here, and there are monsters. And ghosts? Brother, are there ever ghosts. They crowd the suburban streets, looking in our windows, grinning secret grins. Dark things lurk behind freezer doors, in the stomachs of cadavers, and in our hearts. Boden opens up these secret places to show us that when you walk through the past, you walk on unstable ground-and that shadow behind you may not be your own."
- Matthew Bartlett, Author of Creeping Waves and Gateways to Abomination
"When John Boden tells you a tale, he takes his thumb and smudges the lines between stark realism and dreamy fantasy. I can't get enough of his work, and I think Jedi Summer might be his deepest piece yet. "
-Mercedes M. Yardley, author of The Bone Angel trilogy
"Jedi Summer (with The Magnetic Kid) rings with notes of both Bradbury and McCammon, but the voice is all John Boden's own unmistakable blend of unaffected wry humor and melancholy. Boden's portrayal of the narrator's uneasy relationship with both his brother and the town in which they live is magically disquieting. He delivers honest self-reflection without ever venturing into saccharine sentimentality or maudlin self-pity, and his picture of the uncanny summer of 1983 is as clear as a never-played VHS tape right out of the box."
- Bracken MacLeod, author of Mountain Home and Stranded
"A poignant and nostalgic coming of age story with splashes of the morbid and surreal. I absolutely loved it!"
- Mike Lombardo, Director of I'm Dreaming of a White Doomsday and The Stall
"John Boden can do in a sentence what most authors fail to accomplish in whole novels. Yes, Jedi Summer is that good, that textured. It feels like a living thing, a dying thing. Reading it, I became a ghost haunting these characters, floating about as I watched brothers learn to hope, watched them try to unravel the mystery of why and how we love. I was deeply moved and whisked back to my own childhood-the scraped knees, the movie posters fading on the walls of my bedroom, all of my blinding, defining expectations. I can't recommend Jedi Summer enough. It's beautiful."
- Aaron Dries, Author of House of Sighs and A Place for Sinners
