Little Follies: The Personal History, Adventure, Experiences and Observations of Peter Leroy (So Far) by Eric Kraft

Little Follies: The Personal History, Adventure, Experiences and Observations of Peter Leroy (So Far) Reviews

• 
  Ann

  I don't know why more people don't know and love Eric Kraft. This book is delightful and clever but also sincere. A fake memoir written by an untrustworthy narrator questions what it means to remember.
• 
  Ron

  Peter Leroy looks back on his suburban, late 1950s-era childhood with an odd, wonderfully readable and sort of endearingly dry, tongue-in-cheek sense of humor, knowing that he is using his memories of actual events as only the flimsiest of scaffolds on which to build his stories, filled out with plenty of sawdust, his term for the fabrications of imagination that give more meaning to his experiences than they perhaps actually had. So, it is about the way imagination works on memory, the way adult understanding undercuts innocence. As he reconstructs the events he remembers, he retells them in ways that reveal the irony that he now sees. The young Peter tells straightforwardly that way his mother and he neighbor Mr. Beaker joke and josh , and we see the underlying attraction each has for the other. We see Peter and Eliza, Mr. Beaker's girlfriend, playing with the soapsuds as Peter takes a bath, Peter reporting on how flustered Eliza seems to get, and we know why, and so does the adult Peter, but, he remembers, he did not understand what the subtext of all that horseplays was as it happened. Peter is strangely uninterested in just what happens up in Mr. Summers office when he takes the pudgy Young Tars officers up for a weekly lesson in humiliation, though Peter is content to be left on the gym floor to manage the meeting with the other Tars, and has enough inklings of bad things happening that he contrives a way to resign from the Tars just as Porky White peeks through the office door and discovers Mr. Summers weirdness.
  I am glad that it was as excellent on this rereading as it was in my memory. About half of my recent rereadings have fallen short upon reconsideration, but Peter's Personal History, Adventures, Experiences and so on hold up well. I look forward to getting to Where Do You Stop? soon. I frequently laughed out loud, as Guppa wound the coils on the shortwave set, on his great-grandmother carving the coconut heads, as the precociously sexy girls tried their best to interest Peter in the Clothes Closet game or spying on Veronica's mother and the skating coach.
  I will remember Peter getting blackmailed over and over by the girls wanting to be cast as Cordelia in the 4th grade's annual production of King Lear; I will remember the innocent raunchiness of Peter's memories of the Larry Peters stories. I will remember what Porky White said about the similarity between clams and women (the old ones are tough, but full of flavor; the legal ones are tasty, but can be a bit bland, and legally you can't touch the young ones, but sometimes you want their sweet tenderness so much that it is almost worth going after them).
• 
  Holly Ristau

  Stories- enhanced- of growing up. Just ok.
• 
  Charlotte

  Fun, light stories, with unexpected depth and insight. Entertaining to read.