Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Children's Island

Children's Island

Jersild, P. C.
Shideler, Ross
Tate, Joan

Paperback

Series: Modern Scandinavian Literature in Translation

General Fiction

ISBN10: 0803275676
ISBN13: 9780803275676
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: Nov 1 1986
Pages: 288
Weight: 0.84
Height: 0.67 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
First published in Sweden in 1976, Children's Island increased the popularity and critical acclaim of its author, P. C. Jersild. The novel, which has sold more than 400,000 copies in Sweden alone, has been translated into French, German, Dutch, and Czechoslovakian. A film was made out of it. The University of Nebraska Press is the first to make available in English a book in some ways reminiscent of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye.

Children's Island is told from the point of view of a ten-year-old boy, Reine Larsson, who succeeds in not going to summer camp. Reine stays home because time is running out: puberty, sexual desire, adulthood are threatening to rob him of the energy he needs to find the answers to life's dilemmas. He lulls his divorced mother into thinking he has gone to camp and confronts the task of supporting his love for McDonald's hamburgers. What he finds in Stockholm--a kind of Children's Island all its own--is a series of often hilarious adventures that help Jersild define contemporary society. It's a society of isolation, violence, and aggressive commercialism, a society actually much more threatening to Reine's psyche and well-being than the changes taking place within his own body. The revulsion he feels for his sexuality and that of others becomes symbolic of the alienation that defines the world Reine grows up in. Robert E. Bjork, general editor of the Modern Scandinavian Literature in Translation series, calls Children's Island an extremely entertaining, extremely funny, and very serious book.

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