| Coming Of Age |
| Mental Illness |
| Sexual Abuse |
| Depression |
| Social Themes |
| Suicide |
| Young Adult Fiction |
Summary
Summary
★ "Brilliant.... The masterful writing takes readers inside Leonard's tormented mind, enabling a compassionate response to him and to others dealing with trauma." --School Library Journal, starred review
From New York Times bestselling author Matthew Quick comes an intensely compassionate and important book about a boy who brings a gun to school, and the people and experiences that force him to look beyond his pain.
In addition to the P-38, there are four gifts, one for each of my friends. I want to say good-bye to them properly. I want to give them each something to remember me by. To let them know I really cared about them and I'm sorry I couldn't be more than I was--that I couldn't stick around--and that what's going to happen today isn't their fault.
Today is Leonard Peacock's birthday. It is also the day he hides a gun in his backpack. Because today is the day he will kill his former best friend, and then himself, with his grandfather's P-38 pistol.
But first he must say good-bye to the four people who matter most to him: his Humphrey Bogart-obsessed next-door neighbor, Walt; his classmate, Baback, a violin virtuoso; Lauren, the Christian homeschooler he has a crush on; and Herr Silverman, who teaches the high school's class on the Holocaust. Speaking to each in turn, Leonard slowly reveals his secrets as the hours tick by and the moment of truth approaches.
In this riveting look at a day in the life of a disturbed teenage boy, acclaimed author Matthew Quick unflinchingly examines the impossible choices that must be made--and the light in us all that never goes out.
Author Notes
Matthew Quick graduated with a double-majored in English and secondary education from La Salle University in 1996. He taught literature and film at Haddonfield Memorial High School in New Jersey for several years, before leaving in 2004 to become a fiction writer. He received his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Goddard College in 2007. He writes for young adults and adults. His young adult books include Sorta Like a Rock Star, Boy21, and Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock. His adult books include The Silver Linings Playbook, which was made into an Oscar-winning film, and The Good Luck of Right Now.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Quick's books typically revolve around characters who don't fit in, don't understand their place in the world, and face daunting obstacles. Leonard Peacock is another such individual, a teenager who feels let down by adults and out of step with his sheeplike classmates. Foreseeing only more unhappiness and disappointment in life (and harboring a secret that's destroying him), Leonard packs up his grandfather's WWII handgun and heads to school, intending to kill his former best friend and then himself. First, though, he will visit the important people in his life: an elderly cinephile neighbor, a musically gifted classmate, the teacher of his Holocaust studies class, and a homeschooled girl who passes out religious tracts in the train station. Quick's attentiveness to these few key relationships and encounters gives the story its strength and razorlike focus. Its greatest irony is that, despite Leonard's commitment to his murder-suicide plan, he appreciates and values life in a way that few do. Through Leonard, Quick urges readers to look beyond the pain of the here and now to the possibilities that await. Ages 15-up. Agent: Douglas Stewart, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
Eighteen-year-old Leonard Peacock used to be "boring, nice, and normal." Now, he's packing a P-38 WWII Nazi handgun and planning to kill his former best friend Asher, then himself. Leonard claims that Asher has become "the closest modern-day equivalent of a Nazi that we have at my high school," a boy who has so damaged Leonard's life that Leonard sees no future with himself (or Asher) in it. "Show me it's possible to be an adult and also be happy," Leonard says, yearning to know if growing up is worth it, though he figures it isn't. "Herr Silverman," Leonard's Holocaust class teacher, who, mysteriously, never rolls up his shirtsleeves, may be the light in Leonard's darkness, perhaps able to prove "how powerful a weapon being different can be." Over the course of one intense day (with flashbacks), Leonard's existential crisis is delineated through an engaging first-person narrative supplemented with footnotes and letters from the future that urge Leonard to believe in a "life beyond the bermorons" at school. Complicated characters and ideas remain complicated, with no facile resolutions, in this memorable story. dean schneider (c) Copyright 2013. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
A teen boy with a World War II pistol in hand is bent on murder and suicide. Leonard Peacock has big plans for his birthday: He's cut his longish hair down to the scalp, wrapped some going-away presents for his friends and tucked his grandfather's souvenir Nazi-issue P-38 pistol into his backpack. He's off to school, but he plans to make some pit stops along the way to see his friends, including his elderly, Bogart-obsessed neighbor. After he gives his gifts away, he'll murder Asher Beal, another boy at school. Then he'll off himself. To say Quick's latest is dark would be an understatement: Leonard is dealing with some serious issues and comes across as a resolutely heartless killer in the first few pages. As the novel progresses and readers learn more, however, his human side and heart rise to the surface and tug at readers' heartstrings. The work has its quirks. Footnotes run amok, often telling more story than the actual narrative, and some are so long that readers might forget what's happening in the story as they read the footnote. Some readers will eat this up, but others will find it endlessly distracting. Other structural oddities include letters written by Leonard to himself from the future; they seem to make no sense at first, but readers find out later that his teacher recommended he write them to cope with his depression. Despite these eccentricities, the novel presents a host of compelling, well-drawn, realistic characters--all of whom want Leonard to make it through the day safe and sound. An artful, hopeful exploration of a teen boy in intense need. (Fiction. 14 up)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
It's Leonard's eighteenth birthday and, big surprise, nobody remembered. This birthday, however, is going to count because Leonard plans to shoot cruel bully (and former best friend) Asher Beal after school. First, though, there is the small matter of gift giving, in which Leonard delivers four presents to the four people who made his worthless life a little better: a noir film-loving neighbor, a violin prodigy classmate, a superhot teen evangelist, and his favorite teacher. The single-day time frame provides a good deal of claustrophobic tension, as readers will hope against hope that one of these four people will be able to deflect Leonard from his mission. But this is far from a thriller; Quick is most interested in Leonard's psychology, which is simultaneously clear and splintered, and his voice, which is filled with brash humor, self-loathing, and bucket loads of refreshingly messy contradictions, many communicated through Leonard's footnotes to his own story. It may sound bleak, but it is, in fact, quite brave, and Leonard's interspersed fictional notes to himself from 2032 add a unique flavor of hope.--Kraus, Daniel Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
An 18-year-old plans a murder-suicide in Matthew Quick's young adult novel. ON the morning Leonard Peacock, the high school narrator of Matthew Quick's young adult novel, prepares a murder-suicide, he packs the Nazi pistol his grandfather brought back from the war and starts his school day with a plan. It is his 18th birthday. He is targeting his onetime best friend. Creeping through the morning with this secret knowledge, he attempts to reconcile the lives that have gone wrong around him, and to savor the freedom that comes from his imminent demise. Leonard is the product of a wild imagination and a troubled home. His burned-out rocker father flew the coop some years ago; his mother, a fashion designer, is so checked out she doesn't remember his birthday. Some days, he plays hooky and dresses up in businessman attire (he calls it his "funeral suit") to follow the most unhappy-looking grown-ups he can find, trying to understand what keeps them going. Otherwise, he mostly hangs around with his favorite neighbor, a derelict widower named Walt. They watch old Bogart films together and talk in filmnoir quotations - a conversation style limited enough to hide Leonard's turmoil. Quick's previous novels include "The Silver Linings Playbook"; he specializes in voicey, firstperson stories of young people on the ropes. "Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock," in this vein, is meant to be a richly empathetic foray into violent mental illness, and much of the book follows the tortured logic of Leonard's unsettled mind. The day he plans to commit his murder-suicide, he sets about delivering presents to those people he respects as a way of saying goodbye. He thinks his school is filled with "repressed monkeys" and "über morons," with the exception of Herr Silverman, a teacher who leads his favorite Holocaust-history class. Herr Silverman challenges students to think of people as both "human and monster," and has his own secrets: for some reason, he never rolls up his sleeves. Yet he's conventional enough to be concerned when Leonard shows up dispersing valedictions and urges his troubled charge to write himself "letters from the future," imagining the life he'll live if he can make it beyond high school. In fact, Leonard does write some letters, with wildly imaginative, if eccentric, results. (The notes, interspersed among Quick's short chapters, concern a post-apocalyptic landscape called Outpost 37, where Future Leonard runs a lighthouse with his überconcupiscent wife and charming daughter.) But the letters don't wholly comfort him. After paying a final visit to the home-schooled Christian fundamentalist on whom he has a crush - her name is Lauren Rose, and she hands out pamphlets at the train station - he prepares his gun and heads to the home of his former friend. There, he hopes to complete what he calls his "mission." Quick is not the first writer to take on the subject of high school shooters. Teenage gunmen may once have seemed a chilling aberration, but have become, hauntingly, as much a part of the American risk landscape as joy riding and misadventure at prom. Books like Quick's are necessary, if only because novels, at their best, do what horrific headlines cannot: they reintroduce human subjectivity into largescale national disaster. It's one thing, after all, to write a novel from the point of view of a shooting victim, but something else to trace the mind-set of the perpetrator. When the book is intended for teenagers, the moral responsibilities of the project become steeper still. It is not always entirely clear that "Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock" has the stylistic brawn to bear its heavy load. For one thing, Quick's narrator seems awfully jocose for a guy who's homicidally depressed. We recognize some element of disconnected humor in the chilling work of the Columbine shooters. But would someone with a gun and a blind eye to human beauty and invention really quote admiringly from "Hamlet" - he identifies with the protagonist - and offer prattling commentary on his own text in a lot of running footnotes? Would he crack jokes and make puns? "Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock" is supposed to have profoundly real stakes, but its creative style is fast and loose and whimsical - so far from naturalism that it feels, at times, like a particularly wanton dream. The key to broaching fraught subjects is precision of voice and imaginative control; the risk, in airing matters like teenage shootings for young audiences, is making the histrionics of violence look fun. Quick, with his chatty prose and wide imagination, may not walk so delicate a line. The book is full of weird, fantastical tangents (like a trip Leonard takes one day to Lauren's creepy church). And it is studded with Leonard's highly idiosyncratic ruminations. (On birthdays: "When do we stop needing the people around us to acknowledge the fact that we are aging and changing and getting closer to our deaths?") The blithe and quirky charm of these adventures and asides seems misplaced in a novel fingering a fragile point in the American psyche. Yet Quick's eagerness to take on the topic in the voice of the young, isn't. The great horror of teenage gun violence is not what's happened already but what might happen yet. We should be grateful for a book that gets kids, and the leaders they'll become, thinking about the problem now. * FORGIVE ME, LEONARD PEACOCK By Matthew Quick 273 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $18.00. (Young adult; ages 15 and up) The narrator thinks his school is filled with 'repressed monkeys' and 'über morons.' Nathan Heller is a staffwriter for The New Yorker and a film and TV critic for Vogue.
