I Love You, Miss Huddleston

February 9, 2009
Some kids were evidently not unhappy growing up, but they can still get pretty good childhood memoirs, especially if they are honest about exaggerating. Quaker pastor-author Gulley (the Harmony series) writes a low-key Hoosier who's who in this memoir set in Danville, Ind., where youthful acting out takes the form of hurling tomatoes and detonating cans of bug spray. Danville includes Quaker widows aplenty, pals named Peanut and Suds, an arthritic and deaf police dog and a mousery that provisions Indiana's homegrown pharmaceutical manufacturer, Eli Lilly. Gulley has no shortage of material, and the teenage years naturally bring an attack of hormones that prompts pathetic, doomed crushes. We even manage to learn a few facts about the humorist, such as that Gulley grew up Catholic. His chief object of fun is his youthful self, which takes the edge off his views of other characters from his youth, many of whom are relatives. Humor beats nostalgia and drama; this stuff is a laugh-out-loud tweaking of a not terribly misspent youth.

February 15, 2009
A pastor recalls his idyllic youth in America's heartland.

As Quaker Rev. Gulley (Porch Talk: Stories of Decency, Common Sense, and Other Endangered Species, 2007, etc.) admits, his"is not a careful narrative" of the good old days in a small town down the road a bit from Indianapolis. Danville was evidently a sister village to that depicted in Thornton Wilder's elegiac Our Town. The Hoosier hamlet also boasted its native"Doc Gibbs." Corn, cattle and laboratory mice were its chief products. In the style of the late Jean Shepherd, though Gulley is a tad more mannerly, the memoir speaks of bicycles, dogs, an outhouse or two, Halloween mischief, the local funeral parlor and the 4-H Club carnival. His hometown was populated with pals like Suds and Peanuts, relations like Cousin Pooner and sister Chick, assorted citizens like Officer Charley and Orville the grocer. Dad was a gregarious sort and a great bug-spray salesman. Gulley, better known as"Norm and Gloria's boy," mowed lawns for Quaker widows, waxed Dad's car, played pranks, daydreamed about teacher Huddleston and beheld, in awe, the girls of Danville. During those summers past, the latter-day Little Rascals grew into teens with the attendant difficulties of pubescent celibacy. In characteristically candid terms, the author speaks of the lads' concerns about their"winkies." He was the bespectacled skinny kid with the big ears, and this regular, everyday boy presents a regular, everyday bucolic confection.

An agreeable text of easygoing humor that reads like it was written down in a spiral-bound notebook.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

February 15, 2009
Quaker pastor Gulley has made a name with his funny and folksy stories set in Harmony, Indiana, and featuring a Quaker pastor. Those fictions could easily be considered autobiographical, and perhaps to distance his life from his fiction, he here offers his recollections of childhood and adolescence in . . . Indiana (Danville, though). Theyre daffier than the stories. Oh, they start out innocuously enough, on such nostalgia-rousing themes as the new house, the baby picture, the paper route, family vacations, Halloween, the bike, church, chores, the traveling carnival, driving, pranks, and so on. In fairly short order, however, each takes a sharp turn into exaggerationand keeps on turning. Garrison Keillor has nothing on Gulley for wringing the ludicrous from the mundane, but Gulley is never foul-mouthed or louche, and that despite the interest in girls that inevitably emerges in this growing boys life. The book this one is most like may be James Thurbers My Life and Hard Times. OK, not that near-surrealistically inspired. But as flat-out hilarious? Very nearly.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)