Riassunto
Riassunto di Penrod
A chi è rivolto
For readers who love gentle, observant comedy and early twentieth century American small-town life, and anyone who remembers being a boy or raising one.
Che cos’è questo libro
Penrod is a comic novel about a boy of about eleven or twelve in a small Midwestern American town. Booth Tarkington published it in 1914. He had already won readers with serious novels about family and town life, and here he turned his sharp eye on a schoolboy. Penrod Schofield is not a model child and he is not a villain. He is a boy who wants to be admired, who dreads being laughed at, and who keeps landing in trouble through ordinary bad luck and worse judgment.
The book is built as a string of episodes, each one a small adventure with its own mess to clean up. You meet Penrod at home with his parents and his older sister, on the street with his friends, at school, and at his worst moments in front of grown-ups who think they understand him. The pleasure lies in how well the author remembers what it feels like to be that age. Let us begin with the boy himself and the strange rules he lives by.
In questo riassunto
- 1Penrod is a boy, not a modelFree
- 2Home is a place of constant friction
- 3Dreams of glory always go wrong
- 4Friends, rivals and a first crush
- 5The town and its attitudes
- 6A comedy told with love and irony
Punto chiave 1 di 6
Penrod is a boy, not a model
Penrod Schofield is the center of everything in this book. He is a schoolboy with a messy, restless mind, and he is rarely clean for long. He does not set out to be wicked. He sets out to do what seems interesting at the moment, and the consequences arrive afterward.
Tarkington gives Penrod a hidden inner life that grown-ups in the story never see. Adults look at him and see a nuisance who needs correcting. The reader sees a boy with feelings as large as any adult's, only pointed at different things. A bad word, a dare, a stray idea or a bit of attention can send him off on a fresh scheme.
The author never sneers at him. He treats Penrod's troubles with the same seriousness that Penrod brings to them. That is why the comedy works. When Penrod worries about his dignity, we laugh, and we also remember worrying about ours at that age.
This opening point sets the tone for the whole book. Penrod is not meant as a lesson in good behavior. He is a portrait of a real kind of person, drawn with affection and exact detail, and the book asks you to enjoy him before you judge him.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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