Jerry Engels is “the Boy Who Liked Girls.” Not cars or sports or politics—girls. In At the Shores by Thomas Rogers, Jerry spends the summers of his youth at the beaches of Lake Michigan, flirting his way toward adulthood.
At the Shores is often compared to The Catcher in the Rye as an equally compelling, if lesser known, American coming-of-age story. And while Holden Caulfield purports not to like girls (“I mean most girls are so dumb and all”), he might change his mind if he saw Jerry’s list of the girls who most catch his eye.
Jerry’s catalog of girls culminates with Rosalind Ingleside, whom Jerry falls for during his junior year of high school. Rosalind is nice, beautiful, and friendly—how could he resist? But even though Rosalind is “the perfect girl,” she is not the only one for Jerry, who started flirting with the ladies in this list as early as the cradle. Here they are in chronological order.
Jerry Engels’s List of Loves
1.A doll:“He treated his first girl, a disheveled doll, with apache roughness, dragging her around by an arm or a leg.”
2.Louise, the girl next door:“He had played with her under the spirea bushes on Davis Avenue in Whiting, Indiana, and he associated her with the lilies of the valley that grew under the spireas and with the patch of bare dirt where they had made mud pies.”
3.All the girls, really:“He loved the girls in his class, the girls on the block, the maid at home, his sister’s friends, some of his mother’s friends, and all his teachers except Miss Miller who wore a red wig and scared him. He even loved girls he just happened to see out the window of the car.”
Until the day when Rosalind Ingleside becomes his girlfriend, every girl catches Jerry’s eye. As a result, At the Shores is a humorous yet profound celebration of love in all its forms.
Author Thomas Rogers, a graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, taught creative writing at Pennsylvania State University for three decades. Rogers is known for his wry wit and graceful ability to portray young love and alienation. Among fans of Rogers’s work is Philip Roth, who says, “If I had a class in American Adolescence, I’d teach At the Shores in tandem with The Catcher in the Rye and Growing Up Absurd.”
Enroll in Roth’s imaginary course by reading At the Shores, a classic novel of a young man in love with women, the world, and love itself, now available as an ebook: http://www.openroadmedia.com/at-the-shores