{"title":"Amy Benson","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"the-sparkling-eyed-boy-a-memoir-of-love-grown-up-paperback","title":"The Sparkling-Eyed Boy: A Memoir of Love, Grown Up - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"The Sparkling-Eyed Boy is so full of color and light and life.\" -- Brad Land, author of Goat \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\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 \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\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","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":67927004905695,"sku":"9780618433216","price":16.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/YZ8M8FSx5P9780618433216.webp?v=1791247910"}],"url":"https:\/\/blackandbarhe.com\/collections\/amy-benson.oembed","provider":"Black \u0026 Barhe Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}