THE STAND-IN
By Steve Bloom
Carolrhoda Lab Books/Lerner Publishing Group
wwwstevenlbloom.com
One of screenwriter Steve Bloom’s first successes was the 1985 film “The Sure Thing,” a comedy starring a young John Cusak as a college freshman who hitchhikes across the country at Christmas break to meet a girl.
And in his debut Young Adult novel, “The Stand-In,” Bloom, of Amherst, has channeled something of a young Cusak in the story’s narrator, Brooks Rattigan: an alternately ansgt-ridden, scheming and rueful high school senior who longs to move beyond his blue collar New Jersey hometown.
To do that, Brooks, who lives with his frequently stoned mailman father, Charlie, is juggling a heavy load. Between AP courses, SAT preparation, his job at a sandwich shop, and getting high with his best friend, The Murf, he’s got little time for sleep. He’s already losing shut-eye over worries his SATs won’t be good enough to get him into Columbia University, which he’s desperate to attend.
When Brooks helps out the rich cousin of a classmate by taking her to a homecoming dance when her date stands her up, and her grateful family pays him $300 for his time, a lightbulb goes off in his head: He’ll rent himself out to high rollers in the area so their daughters get their shot at the senior social scene, and then use his earnings to hire a tutor to boost his SAT scores.
“Homecoming. Winter Formal. Spring Fling. Prom. … it’s amazing how many once-in-a-lifetime events there are in the course of a single high school year,” he says. And the girls he takes to these affairs, he adds, are all “infected with the same raging, incurable disease. FOMO. Fear of Missing Out.”
But if the sardonic Brooks thinks his path to Columbia is now set, he hasn’t reckoned with two of his faux dates, the beautiful Shelby Pace and the more unconventional Celia Lieberman, who both tug at his heart. Love, it seems, can make the moral corner-cutting and fabrications he employs to mingle with the one-percent crowd that much tougher to pull off.
Bloom, whose screenplay credentials include “James and the Giant Peach” and “Jack Frost,” says movie rights for “The Stand-In” have been purchased by Awesomeness Films.
Steve Bloom will discuss his work Monday at 7 p.m. as part of a writers workshop in the Williston Theatre at the Williston Northampton School in Easthampton.
VALIANT GENTLEMEN
By Sabina Murray
Grove Atlantic
sabinamurray.com
Historical novelist Sabina Murray’s new book, “Valiant Gentlemen,” weighs in on a serious scale, spanning four continents and covering three decades, from the late 19th century to the early 1900s.
Murray, a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, reimagines the lives and friendship of Roger Casement, an Irish patriot and British diplomat, and Herbert Ward, an English sculptor and African explorer. The two went on an epic journey through central Africa in the 1880s, and Casement later became a key figure in the investigation into horrendous human rights abuses in the then-Belgian Congo.
In Murray’s story, the two friends become a trio when Ward marries Sarita Sanford, a spirited Argentinian-American heiress, and the couple begins a family. Casement is at pains to conceal his homosexuality as the story moves from Africa to the United States and back to Europe.
When World War I erupts, a fissure between the friends over political differences becomes a chasm. Ward, too old to fight, joins a British ambulance service in France; Casement instead seeks help from the Germans in freeing Ireland from English control. He even travels to Germany to try and recruit a free brigade from Irish prisoners of war.
As happened historically, Casement is arrested during the Irish uprising in 1916 and tried for treason, and the British government leaks word of his homosexuality to turn all public sentiment against him. One person unwilling to forgive him is Herbert Ward.
It’s a story with great sweep, romance and tragedy, and Murray pulls it off with what Publisher’s Weekly calls “an impressive balance of historical accuracy and dramatic momentum … that shows how the grand course of history can be shaped by the smallest disagreements between friends.”
Sabina Murray reads from “Valiant Gentlemen” Nov. 17 at 7 p.m. at the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley.