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Days of Wonder is a little deceptive as a name of a book because it’s a title of hope. The book is about two 15-year-olds from different classes in NYC who fall madly in love and are about to be separated by the boy’s abusive father, and so they start fantasizing about killing him. And then the fantasy veers into something realer, and both kids are accused of attempted murder. Both kids were sleep-deprived and drugged-up the night of crime, and neither can really remember just what happened. Jude, with a wealthy dad and a good lawyer, goes free, but Ella gets 25 years. When she’s early released after six years, she’s desperate to find Jude, to find her child, and to find out what really happened that night, and why?
Doesn’t seem like the stuff of wonder, does it? But I wanted to focus on the bright glints of life or hope that appear in a lot of the novel’s darkness. Yes, this great gorgeous young love is destroyed, but like that great old movie, Splendor in the Grass, there is always the memory of it. Things don’t work out the way any of the characters imagine they will, and there is a tremendous cost to everyone, but out of that darkness, there is growth, understanding, and yeah, a sense of wonder about how the world works. I wanted that wonder to be revealed at the end when...[read on]
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My Book, the Movie: Pictures of You.
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My Book, The Movie: Cruel Beautiful World.
The Page 69 Test: Cruel Beautiful World.
Writers Read: Caroline Leavitt (October 2016).
My Book, The Movie: Days of Wonder.
Q&A with Caroline Leavitt.
--Marshal Zeringue
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