10th Grade: A Novel

For all those times you wished you knew what your high school crush was thinking, Joseph Weisberg's 10th Grade provides a generous--and hilarious--peek inside one boy's journal of a year marked by unrequited lust and awkward social maneuvers. A sophomore at Hutch Falls High School in New Jersey, Jeremy Reskin trolls the halls and writes what he sees from his vantage point as a social nonentity. Not much of a student, not much of a jock, and definitely not much of a ladies' man, Jeremy reveals his talent for expressing himself through writing (even though his every thought reads like a giant run-on sentence, complete with dyslexic spelling and sporadic punctuation). Jeremy's sophomore story is so achingly familiar that it's nearly impossible to put this book down. Weisberg deftly captures a time that readers will feel nostalgic for--even while cringing--and he creates a very real cast of characters that any one of us could have known in class. The complicated, often traumatic limbo between childhood and adulthood rings so true from the beginning to the end of this debut novel that you will want everyone you still talk to from high school to read it. As for Jeremy, all we can hope is that things get easier by the time he graduates. --Emily Russin