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Delta
November 0000
On Sale: December 28, 2004
288 pages
ISBN: 0385338139
EAN: 9780385338134
Trade Size (reprint)
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Women's Fiction
The love of family. The heartbreak of war. The triumph of coming home.
1940. Rural Wisconsin. Sixteen-year-old Earl βEarwigβ Gunderman is not like other boys his age. Fiercely protected by his older brother, Earwig sees his town and the world around him through the prism of his own unique understanding. He sees his motherβs sadness and his fatherβs growing solitude. He sees his brother, Jimmy, falling in love with the most beautiful girl in town. And while Earwig is unable to make change for customers at his familyβs store, he is singularly well suited to understand what other people in his town cannot: that life as they know it is about to change; the coming war will touch them all.
For Jimmy will enlist in the military. And Earwig will watch his parentsβ marriage buckle under the strain of a family secret. And when Jimmy returnsβa fractured shadow of his former selfβit is Earwigβs turn to care for him. His struggles to right the wrongs visited upon his revered older brother by war, women, and life are at once heartwarming and riotously funny. Their family and town irrevocably altered, Earwig and Jimmy fight to find their own places in a world changed forever.
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