The Year of the Zinc Penny Paperback – September 1, 1990by.

New York, NY HarperCollins: HarperPerennial, 1990. Paperback First Edition Thus; First Printing indicated. First Edition Thus; First Printing indicated. Very Near Fine in Wraps: the pages have tanned somewhat, due to aging and the light tan background field of the backstrip is ever so sligntly sunned (the titles thereon remain unaffected: bold and clearly legible); the binding remains square and secure; text clean. Virtually 'As New'. NOT a Remainder, Book-Club, or Ex-Library. 8vo. 174pp. Trade Paperback. This short, bittersweet novel tells the first-person story of a ten-year-old boy living in wartime Los Angeles. The year is 1943. Men are off fighting the war; women are riveting planes in the city's aircraft factories. The protagonist, Trygve (nicknamed Monk), lives in a crowded apartment with his mother and her show-business aspiring boyfriend, her sister and her sister's Canadian husband, and his teenage son. Seen through the inexperienced but curious eyes of a boy, these characters form the center of the novel, which traces events in their emotionally tangled, often unstable lives. Impressionable and inquisitive, the young hero is continually instructed in the ill-formed opinions of the older males in his life, while his mostly sensible mother tries without much success to counter-balance her sister's other-worldly reflections on past lives and the tenuousness of this one. Meanwhile, his fevered imagination is fed by the movies and what he hears on his short-wave radio set, as he daydreams of piloting fighter jets only to die melodramatically in the arms of grade school sweethearts. Like everyday life itself, there's no particular plot line to this story, just one thing after another, finally adding up to a kind of worldly wisdom that sometimes comes in times of war, dislocation and anxiety - represented here by the image of Kilroy peeking quizzically over a fence. I recommend this novel to readers interested in the zeitgeist of the 1940s war years (the period details evoke this era wonderfully), Los Angeles, and coming-of-age stories. It will leave you with memories of those years on the verge of puberty, first love, and an ever-elusive maturity.