The most poignant coming-of-age novels about boys

Edisto was the first coming-of-age novel I fell in love with as an adult reader and the book that showed me the tremendous literary potential of the genre. Padgett Powell endows his protagonist, twelve-year-old Simons, with what comes across as precociousness, but in fact reflects the depth of thinking that many young tweens and teens have. Simons wrestles with his narcissistic parents’ competing visions of his future—although neither bothers to ask him what he wants—while hanging out on the sultry island of Edisto off the coast of South Carolina with an enigmatic older acquaintance, Taurus, who offers him tastes of adult life and the kind of attention his parents are incapable of providing. Powell’s deft prose and realistic dialogue make it all fully believable, and at times riotously funny. Edisto is nothing short of brilliant.

You’re fifteen years old, living unhappily with your feckless parents and unstable older sister in a small town in Montana. And then your family implodes: your parents are arrested for bank robbery and your sister flees to parts unknown. As troubling as the premise is, Canada becomes even darker and more ominous as young Dell Parsons travels alone to Saskatchewan to live with erstwhile family friends, but in fact enters a whole new world of intrigue and violence. Dell is a stoic character, and you desperately want to see his life take a turn for the better. What you get instead is a case study in resiliency and survival. Ford’s prose is powerful; every word counts, every sentence pulls you deeper into the story.

Skippy Dies is nearly 700 pages long, but I wished it had been longer, it was that fun to read. It’s both tragically sad and laugh-out-loud funny—a difficult feat for any writer to pull off, and Irish novelist Paul Murray does so brilliantly. I’m not giving away anything by saying that the protagonist dies—after all, he dies in the book’s title—but I won’t reveal how or the circumstances. Let’s just say that if you are a diminutive, shy, buck-toothed 14-year-old at an all-boys boarding school in Dublin and somehow manage to develop a crush on the girlfriend of an older, drug-dealing, violent bully…well, things can’t turn out good. The cast of characters—the teenagers, the teachers, the school principal—are wonderfully drawn. Murray’s dialogue captures the boasting machismo as well as the angsty insecurities of teenage boyhood. A real gem.

Bruiser is only nine years old, younger than most “coming of age” protagonists, but his anxiety-ridden family life in a Manhattan apartment has aged him. His father is a philanderer who rarely is home and often physically abusive when he is; his mother is a deeply depressed poet. Bruiser spends most of his time running around his Upper West Side neighborhood with a make-shift gang of older boys—and has the bruises to show for it, hence his nickname—or hiding at the bottom of the clothes hamper when his parents are going at it. He befriends a 10-year-old girl, Darla, who lives across the courtyard with her drug-addled mother and who convinces him to run away with her. Their journey, which takes them first to West Virginia in search of Darla’s father and eventually to North Carolina, is the book’s magic. Both kids are pre-puberty, so it’s more like two buddies on a venture—although Bruiser’s internal life is what gives Chorao’s book such power. 

Twelve-year-old Edward Adler enters his coming-of-age years in the wake of a horrific tragedy: A plane crash kills his parents and his cherished older brother; Edward is the doomed flight’s only survivor. How does one “grow up” when your past is effectively erased, when those you most love have been yanked from your life, when there is no one else on earth who shares your childhood memories? Edward goes to live with childless relatives who have no idea how to relate to him—honestly, who would?—and is thrust back into the normal rhythms and expectations of teen life. He shies away from the unwanted fame his “sole survivor” status has bestowed on him. It seems that he will be doomed to a life of lonely pain until he makes a shocking discovery that creates the possibility of a new beginning. Napolitano guides us along Edward’s emotional journey in a way that allows the reader to feel his pain and heartbreak, but she never gets maudlin. This book will stay with you for a long time.