Rebecca Coffey's review of The Skinny Years

 

Rebecca Coffey is a science journalist, humorist and the author of several books. She contributes to Scientific American and Discover magazines, as well as to McSweeney's Internet Tendency and The Rumpus. She blogs for Psychology Today and is a frequent guest on talk shows including her on-air commentary for Vermont Public Radio. 

Her latest novel, Hysterical: Anna Freud's Story has garnered glowing reviews from Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, LAMDA Literary, and the project director of the Freud Archives, to name a few. So Rebecca’s take on The Skinny Years was reason for elation by its author. Here is her full review:

"Raul Ramos y Sanchez’s The Skinny Years reminded me how precarious world events could make life in the 1960s feel. The “Skinny” of the novel’s title is a pudgy Cuban immigrant boy, a perennial outsider looking in. He’s got his mind and heart focused safely on the sweet, beautiful rich girl in his class. Meanwhile his peripheral vision catches an onslaught of very real calamities. The many humiliations of poverty. Pervasive racism and jingoism that, as a white Cuban in Miami, he can almost sidestep. The Bay of Pigs. Slaughter in Vietnam. Classroom safety movies about how to survive nuclear holocaust. Triggers like these conspire to drive Skinny ever more deeply into an almost carnival-like circle of naysayers, druggies, and dreamers. The Skinny Years is as nervy and improbable as Oliver Twist and The Goldfinch. And that’s saying a lot."

-- Rebecca Coffey, author of Hysterical: Anna Freud's Story. 

I want to thank Rebecca for her kind words and for taking the time to review The Skinny Years.

Raul Ramos y Sanchez