Product Description

Downers Grove is the haunting and tender story of Chrissie Swanson, a paranoid high school senior for whom graduating has become a matter of life or death. She's an unusual girl in an ordinary town. Her mother's sex life is overshadowing her own; her brother is aboard his own private Enterprise, slipping into one black hole after another; her best friend is hornier than a Prince song; leaving her eccentric grandmother as the only source of wisdom in a rapid downward spiral. As Chrissie tries to take control of the events that shape her life, she finds the events beginning to take control of her, until she is finally cornered by choices with everlasting consequences. Full of humor, wit, and the sacrilegious worldview of a savvy teenager, Downers Grove paints a searing portrait of the American dream in all its broken glory.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #666311 in Books
• Published on: 2001-03-01
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .64" h x 5.56" w x 8.40" l, .61 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Disquieting in its timeliness, Hornburg's (Bongwater) second novel is a tale of violence among high school cliques and a gritty portrait of adolescent pluck amid morbid chaos. Narrator Crystal Methedrine Swanson is on the verge of graduating from Downers Grove High in Illinois. Chrissie, as her friends call her, has a lot to deal with on the home front: her father has left without a trace, her brother is addicted to heroin and her mother is dating an increasingly sinister new beau. Chrissie and her boy-crazy, sexpot best friend, Tracy, also worry about "the curse" of their high school: each year before graduation, somebody in the senior class dies in a bizarre way. One year a math whiz killed several people in the parking lot before turning the shotgun on himself; other graduations were marred by suicide, drowning and several drunk-driving accidents. After Chrissie beats up a jock who tried to rape her at a party, she becomes terrified that she will be the next statistic. The jock and his buddies pursue an escalating plot of revenge beginning with a vicious car chase. They also set fire to Chrissie's school locker and strew dead dogs on her lawn. Adding to the plot twists of this teenybopper drama is Chrissie's obsession with a 26-year-old mechanic--cum-race-car driver named Bobby. Tough, insensitive and super-cool, Bobby is the kind of character only a teenage girl could love. Hornburg's prose is rife with adolescent jokes and lingo, some of it hilarious and sharp. At other times the humor wears thin, especially because Chrissie's youthful wisecracking does not segue smoothly into passages of soul-searching introspection. Yet Chrissie's relentlessly vernacular teenage voice takes up residence in the reader's mind, establishing her vulnerability and demonstrating the courage she shows on her stressful road to maturity. Photos. (Aug.) FYI: Hornburg is managing editor of Grove/Atlantic.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Hornburg, author of Bongwater (1995), alternates wit with lyricism in this tale about the last weeks of a suburbanite high-schooler's senior year. As her name suggests, Crystal Methedrine Swanson (she goes by Chrissie) comes from an off-kilter family. Dad has disappeared. Her brother is a basement-dwelling, music-addled junkie. Mom, anxious for relief, is dating a churchgoing man. Even Grandma is strange, but she, at least, provides the novel's spiritual center. Chrissie's troubles begin when she falls for a feral mechanic and earns herself a pack of murderous enemies after defending herself against a drunken assault at a kegger. As she and her best friend, the libidinous VW-driving Tracy, mug their way through a series of increasingly unconvincing misadventures, Hornburg allows his electrifying portrayal of adolescent angst to mutate into a mishmash of movie-and MTV-generated cliches. But his evocation of the suburbs as "ghettos of meaninglessness" and his sensitivity to both the violence of teen culture and the innate radiance of young people make this flawed novel worth reading. Donna Seaman

From Kirkus Reviews
A highly polished, smoothly written second effort by Hornburg (Bongwater, 1995) with an affecting and naturally easy voicebut without much of a story to tell. The authors clearly tapped in, not only to the outlook and concerns of teenagers in general, but to the character who tells this story in particular. Chrissie Swanson, age 17, of Downers Grove, Illinoishis most successful creationnarrates in her entirely distinctive, smart, blithely ironic voice. Her brother, David, has retreated, semi-permanently, to the basement of the Swanson home, where he snorts heroin and plays gin rummy with his friends. Meanwhile, Chrissie's divorced mother has become seriously involved with a vaguely disturbing Christian used-car salesman and considers abandoning the family to marry her man. Faced with these uncertainties, Chrissie wanders through the last weeks of her senior year with Tracy, her best friend, and together they stumble into a party filled with strangers. Chrissie is nearly raped and ends up tossing a car battery through her attackers car, which sets off their novel-length, episodic quest for revenge. Just as quickly, Chrissie loses her heart to a distant, somehow vulnerable mechanic, 26-year-old Bobby, who races cars on the side. In the literal background, a petroleum fire in a nearby town burns across the final days of the story. Bobby, plumped to a romantic hero in Chrissie's eyes, rescues her from probable death at the hands of the menacing bullies, but when he invites her to leave town with him, she realizes his taste for danger predicts future unhappiness for them both. Advised by her eccentric and wise grandmother, Chrissie becomes a more mature, less jagged personality; the tale concludes when she takes a summer job at Dairy Queen. The story of Chrissie's life is a saga a magazine profile might strain to fill. Hornburg needs only something to say with his nearly faultless ear and delightful authorial voice. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.