Jennie's Boy: A Misfit Childhood on an Island of Eccentrics

** Winner of the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour **

The sad, tender, and extremely funny memoir of a boyhood few thought he would survive, including the unforgettable mother and hilarious grandmother who raised him

A book to be relished by lovers of such works as The Glass Castle, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, and Angela's Ashes

Everything readers love about consummate storyteller and beloved bestselling novelist Wayne Johnston's work is on full display in Jennie's Boy incredible characters, brilliant language, and a deep sense of place.

Wayne Johnston's family -- his mother, father, and three brothers -- were always on the move. The year he turned eight, the most memorable year of an unusual childhood, they found themselves occupying a wreck of a house in the community his mother Jennie was from: Goulds, Newfoundland was not so much a place as a scattering of homes along an unpaved road.

Everyone knew him as "Jennie's boy," and his tiny, ferocious mother felt judged for Wayne's sickly, skinny condition -- he had to spend much of his time in a bed on wheels that was moved from room to room. While his brothers went off to school, Wayne passed his days with his witty, eccentric maternal grandmother, Lucy, whose son Leonard had died at the age of seven and whose photo stood alongside a statue of the Blessed Virgin.

Jennie's Boy recalls a boyhood full of pain, laughter, tenderness, and the kind of wit for which Newfoundlanders are known. By that wit, and by their love for each other -- so often expressed in the most unloving ways -- he, and they, survived.

Author: Wayne Johnston
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 02/07/2023
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.71lbs
Size: 8.24h x 5.59w x 0.85d
ISBN13: 9781586423629
ISBN10: 1586423622
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | Personal Memoirs
- Social Science | Poverty & Homelessness
- History | Canada | Provincial, Territorial & Local | Atlantic Province

About the Author
Widely acclaimed for his magical weaving of fact and fiction, his masterful plotting and his gift for both description and character, Wayne Johnston's many novels include The Custodian of Paradise, The Navigator of New York and The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, which was a finalist for sixteen Canadian and international awards, including the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, and which won the New York Public Libraries Prize for Best Novel and was chosen by the Los Angeles Times as one of the Ten Best Books of the year. Baltimore's Mansion, a memoir about his father and grandfather, won the inaugural Charles Taylor Prize for literary nonfiction.