The Beet Fields: Memories Of A Sixteenth Summer (2002) - Plot & Excerpts
This was a real good book if you like the outdoors and farming. It was about a boy who ran away from home because his parents love to drink all the time. He was young with no food, or home,and he was living on the streets with no money. He came to a farm that needed help on the beet fields. The farm owner gave him a job and he was working in the fields everyday from dust till dawn. He worked with a family of Mexicans who didn't really talk to him, until one day and he became close to them. Whan everything at the farm had been done and there was no more work for them they had to move on to anuther and then anuther and thats what they had to do to get money to live. So the book follows the boy through his jurney of his new life. Telling you what he had to go through.So it was a real good book, it will make you not wont to stop reading. Thats the best thing, plus the book will make you think about how hard it must be to be so young and be a run away with no food, home, or money to get any of those things or anyother things. It will show you how hard it would be and how your life would change just by running away from home. The boy has to face alot of things and trubles in his jurny. So if you like reading things that will keep you on the edge of your seet and not wont to stop reading then this is the book you should read.
Ah, young lust.Let's face it, I picked up this book as a young teen girl because it had a shirtless boy on the front cover. Hormones. Sue me.What I didn't expect was that lust was the river this ferryboat novel sailed on. The themes, the plot, none of that mattered so much as sex and strippers.It would be one thing if sex was a motif or a scene of the book. I might like it if the themes of family and belonging were the focus. But they weren't. And since the target audience for this book seems to be teen heterosexual males, I truly don't understand the cover art. A more "appropriate" (for the book, not generally speaking) cover for the book might feature a half-nude Ruby, legs open wide.In the end, this came across as an aging man's idealistic yet melodramatic re-imagining of his own youth. I might recommend it for 16 to 20-year-old boys, but no one else.I wish I had better suggestions for younger lust-crazed teen boys, but alas, I know nothing. For teen girls, however, the Georgia Nicolson series by Louise Rennison is hilarious, like a PG-13 Bridget Jones's Diary. It begins with Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging
What do You think about The Beet Fields: Memories Of A Sixteenth Summer (2002)?
Ok?That was my reaction when I finished this book. It's your typical YA novel of a troubled youth searching for identity and redemption. His dad is lost at war, his mom's a drunk and he runs away in an adventure full of arbitrary encounters resembling Holden Caulfield's own search for self in Catcher in the Rye. Gary Paulsen claims that in writing this book he achieved a greater sense of honesty than in his other novels. And perhaps it is an honest reflection of disillusionment in life. By the end of the book (plot spoiler) our protagonist falls back into the cycle of despair he originally fled from.I wouldn't recommend the book, especially for young adults. Too much adult content that is unjustified.
—Evelyn
I thoroughly enjoyed the build-up of this story and the descriptions of the boy's jobs and adventures along the way. I felt the opening was so well written where we get a brief but telling glimpse of the boy's disfunctional family life - BUT - I did not like the ending, not because of the topic of teenage sex, which Paulsen did a good job with, including his inexperience not seeming stupid or funny, but just ... normal. I did not like the ending because it felt disconnected from his previous journey of the prior chapters. The opening chapters of his experiences with the Mexican migrant workers seemed to take the book one place (on one kind of journey) and his final carny experiences seemed a world away without much transition or reflection on what had come before. I almost felt rushed to the end as the chapters where the boy moves from farmwork to carnival seemed all too brief or maybe even missing something, including a car wreck which seemed pointless in the big picture of the plot. I rarely feel this way but I think the book could have been longer. I really did like the book but wish it had moved along differently.
—Doug Sacks
GARY PAULSEN CATEGORYThe authenticity of Paulsen's story--which he has admitted to be at least in part auto-biographical--makes it endearing and compensates somewhat for its simplistic nature. "The Beet Fields" is a story about a 16 year old boy who has run away from home. Unfortunately, the nobility of some of the characters and even the protagonist is mitigated somewhat by the novel's obsession with sex. The take-home message of the book seems to be that just when you think guys are deep, comp
—Evan Hall
