Elizabeth Berg - Joy School

A funny, sweet, coming-of-age narrative. Its heart and wit will remind Bergs fans why her writing is so eminently likable.

Chicago Tribune

If you remember the heart-slamming intensity of your own first love, Joy School will recall the pain and exhilaration that intersect when that love is unrequited. Bergs peripheral characters are a treat: Vivid and quirky, they do more than fill in the background. These are people who encourage the reader to imagine what their own stories would be.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Growing up is hurtful, humorous, petty, and very, very serious. Berg has beautifully wrought this stage of life in her witty, warm way. Like every other Berg novel, Joy School is a joy to read.

The Orlando Sentinel

Bergs style works beautifullydeceptively simple, conversational, and hip.

USA Today

Dreamy and fragile, Bergs heroine is so convincingly brought to life that we feel her joys and sorrows as though they were our own.

The Baltimore Sun

Berg is a wily writer who has no trouble whipping up something sweet and satisfying. [Joy School] will touch the most sophisticated readers heart.

Houston Chronicle

One of the best things about this wonderful book is how funny it is. Dont read it anywhere youre not willing to risk being caught laughing out loud.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

A coming-of-age story that is neither grim nor saccharine, an exploration of how, for one spirited girl, life brings both daily grief and daily joy Joy School possesses many of the strengths of [Durable Goods], most notably the narrators voice. Katie is funny, imaginative, irreverent, idiosyncratic, and deeply, unusually charming.

The Boston Sunday Globe

A sweet-sad initiation story told in Bergs compelling voice.

Newark Star-Ledger

The reader feels tenderness toward the childs hope and toughness, and recognizes wisdom in her guileless voice. Berg captures particularly well the feeling of loneliness and the sadness of growth and change.

Dallas Morning News

Wonderful. Another must for Elizabeth Berg fans. Once you develop a taste for what she does with language and deeply rooted emotions, you devour [her books]. They are as a woman thinketh and feeleth and liveth in this whirling world where you only rarely stop to smell the rain-wet lilacs.

News &Record (Greensboro, NC)

Much to the delight of Elizabeth Berg fans, Katie, the adolescent Army brat at the center of Bergs first novel, Durable Goods, returns as the focus of [Joy School]. In this latest work the author takes great care in exposing the loneliness that trips up her beloved character while also revealing the people and moments that truly do make this awkward age a Joy School. The adolescent internal monologue offered by Bergwith Katie second-guessing herself, fantasizing and exaggeratingis both hilarious and breathtaking. The teacher descriptions alone deliver a book worth buying.

San Francisco Chronicle

An opalescent tale Berg handles Katies mystification with sweet aplomb, tracking surges with a meteorologists delight.The lesson of Joy School is not that weeping endureth a night, but that ordinary young humans must learn to endure themselves.

Boston magazine

Bergs stories have a way of making you remember things you never thought youd forget. She gives us all a voice and company through the trial we face. Her stories are powerful, true, and speak straight to the heart without ignoring the head.

Nomad

As she has demonstrated in previous books, Berg can conjure character with a minimum of words and a rainbow of nuance. The reader misses Katie the instant the book ends.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Also by Elizabeth Berg

THE ART OF MENDING
SAY WHEN
TRUE TO FORM
NEVER CHANGE
ORDINARY LIFE
OPEN HOUSE
ESCAPING INTO THE OPEN: THE ART
OF WRITING TRUE
UNTIL THE REAL THING COMES ALONG
WHAT WE KEEP
THE PULL OF THE MOON
RANGE OF MOTION
TALK BEFORE SLEEP
DURABLE GOODS
FAMILY TRADITIONS

For Marianne Quasha,

Whose stories inspire me

And whose friendship sustains me,

and for Bill Young,

Charming, patient and true.

This time I want first to acknowledge those readers who have taken the trouble to write and tell me how they feel about my books. Your letters live in a beautiful brown box and are cherished.

And thanks again to my writing group; to my agent, Lisa Bankoff, and her assistant, Abigail Rose; and to my editor, Kate Medina, and her assistant, Renana Meyers. Thanks also to Alfred Connell, landlord extraordinaire, who rents me my beautiful office in the great town of Natick, and to Buzzy Bartone, an artist whose medium is flowers, and whose work brings everyone joy.

T he housekeeper is ironing and I am lying on the floor beside her, trying to secretly look up her dress. I cant see anything but her slip. It is white, a skinny line of lace trim on the bottom, which I already knew because it was hanging out when she first got here, snowing down south. I had a thought to tell her, in a nice way. But what would be the point, its only us two here and Im not offended.

I used to think you had to be rich to have a housekeeper, but its not true. Sometimes you are rich, but sometimes you only have a need and that is when you get messy housekeepers like this one. Not that I dont like her. Ginger is her name, like the dancer, and her hair is blond like that dancer, too. She wears socks that fall down into the backs of her loafersthin, white, wrong ones, though she is done with school so it isnt so important. I found out at my new high school, where I am a freshman, about wrong socks and I had to quit wearing them. Of course that is only the tip of the iceberg.

Ginger takes the bus here. She carries a bag made out of rough striped material with wooden handles, and in the bag are slippers and her lunch and a paperback book with a curled-up cover which she reads every day at noontime. Once she gave me the candy bar from her lunch. Oh no, I said but she said, Oh sure, go ahead, I dont need it. It was the Hersheys with almonds kind. Usually she has Heath, so I think it was a case of this was a substitute candy bar anyway, so I did take it. I ate it that night while I read in bed with my knees up. This is how my mother did it, only she also ate fruit. I dont like fruit unless it is hot and in a pie. I suppose that is un-American and another thing wrong with me, which it seems is all that is happening now is I am finding out everything wrong with me. This place and I do not get along.

Ginger shifts a little on her feet, and the slip moves and now I can see her underpants. They are only white. I get up and go into my room and close the door quietly so as not to hurt her feelings. I mean that she cant come in, but its not anything against her.

I take out the letter from my drawer. It still smells of lilacs. Shed drawn a circle on the envelope, saying, Sniff here! but I didnt have to smell that place, the whole letter smelled.

Dear Katie,

I have been so unbelievably busy and thats why it has taken so long to write to you. I like your letters. Theyre funny.

The family that moved into your house is useless. There are only little kids and the parents are all the time asking me to baby-sit, which I do NOT have time for. As if I wanted to even if I did have time. I believe I am done with baby-sitting. Even though last time at McLaughlins you would not believe what I found, I looked in their dresser drawer and found a box of rubbers!!!! You remember when Marybeth told us she had seen a weenie because when her parents werent home that time Jerry Southerland had come out of her bathroom with it hanging out (DONT let ANYONE see this letter!!!!!!!) and it was all red at the tip like a dogs? Well, I saw that box of rubbers and I was thinking how it would look on the red and you can imagine how I wanted to puke