Penrod

Penrod Schofield is eleven years old, stuck in Indianapolis at the turn of the century, and he is being forced to wear tights. Not just any tights: the gleaming, ridiculous, "Child Sir Lancelot" tights of Mrs. Lora Rewbush's Pageant of the Table Round. Every Saturday afternoon, before the town's women, he must prance across a stage pretending to be a knight, while his real life, his dog Duke, his ragtag gang of friends, the actual adventures waiting for him outside, passes by without him. Tarkington understood something essential about childhood: that its torments are not small. Penrod's humiliation is real, his longing for freedom is real, and his furious incomprehension at the adult world is the oldest story ever told. This is not a nostalgic trip back to a simpler time. It is a ruthlessly funny portrait of what it feels like to be eleven, to be forced into ridiculous costumes, to resent everyone older than you, and to believe absolutely that you are the most put-upon person who has ever lived. The novel weaves together comic episodes, school, family, friends, the endless schemes of boys being boys, into something that captures the specific, unironic anguish of youth with a novelist's cruel precision.