Smith’s prose is exceptional in the way it’s able to seamlessly blend a conversational tone while still maintaining a sense of control over narrative. The narration is chipper and youthful and you’re able to follow along like one of your best friends is telling you a story ... The juxtaposition between violence and tenderness in the book is stunning ... Another thing that enhances the experience of reading Teenager are the incredible illustrations by Rae Buleri in almost every chapter. Images of record players, animatronic horses, flowers, and more pepper the narrative and give us an expansive look into the world of Smith's characters ... took me for a ride—through the East Coast, to Montana, to California, all the way into my feelings. This book is full of wonder, awe, MREs, Elvis songs, wild stallions, and getaways. By the end of it, I felt like I had witnessed the rebirth of something—some spirit of Americana that’s been missing, or maybe was always there but is now out in the open, rejuvenated and bright. Whatever it is, Bud Smith’s prose made the world around me feel ethereal for a brief moment in time ... What else is there to say—this book is just a killer read.
Franz Kafka could not have set the stage better than Bud Smith for the whimsical journey that these star-crossed lovers traverse. The two lovers leaned forward into the long roads of an idyllic America, leaving nothing behind them except the sad skies of New Jersey. They just could never have predicted the hilariously bizarre and fanciful events that would come next. Impulsive and excited teenagers rarely do ... The combination of such unrelated and beguiling things seems like they couldn’t even fit into a series, let alone one novel. But the absurd and darkly humorous experiences are the beauty of Teenager ... This novel is the wayward fantasy that most adults have lost. Where we see danger, they see adventure. What we see as red flags, they see as quirkiness. Darkness does not exist for them once they are free of the adults in their lives. Only a whimsical sense of self-determination. We have felt this. Bud Smith has felt this. And now that he has written this nostalgic love letter to our youth, we can feel it again.
That Kody manages an impossible escape in the first two pages is a shrewd move by Smith. It invites the reader into this world with a challenge: if you can’t suspend your disbelief on page one, Teenager warns, you’re going to have a bad time. If, however, you can accept a certain degree of good fortune smiling upon impossible pursuits, if you can look nowhere else but forward, your reward is a beautiful, doomed adventure steeped in a lovely and vital escapism, crashing through the underbrush toward salvation ... not expressly billed as YA (though it’s easy to see younger readers falling in love with it), but it illuminates the inner lives of teenagers from the sensitive perspective of a writer who hasn’t yet had the exuberant optimism of youth wrung out of him. He writes from what feels like an authentically teenaged vantage point, rather than as an adult trying to imagine how a teenager would see the world ... One almost has to be in love—or at least remember being in love, or at least be uncynical enough to still feel charmed by a good love story—to get at the bedrock idea of Teenager, which is that love, regardless of time or place or circumstance, is always right and worth the trouble, and true love, to paraphrase Elizabeth Wurtzel, tends to take care of its own ... Unlike Kerouac’s American landscape, which Teenager pays homage to, there is not much to learn from the people inhabiting it. For all their personalities, they are ghosts, passing visions in the mad rush to an ever-shifting idea of freedom. Juxtaposed with its timeless narrative, this makes the novel undeniably modern, speaking to our baseline isolation. Over-connected as we are, to the world, to each other, we are also, at the end of the day, just passing through.
... a text which diagnoses the simultaneously short and far-sighted condition of youth, its absurd logic and its uncanny wisdom ... What I love most about Teenager is its willingness to learn. To be clear, I don’t mean Smith’s willingness to write character arcs, or his ability to write a character who learns. No, I mean that I love the way that the book itself learns as it goes on, the way it comes to redefine happiness. Over the course of its 383 pages, Teenager understands happiness as motion away from hopelessness, then as simple motion, and then, finally, as a kind of stasis daring hopelessness to catch up ... PS: I can’t and I won’t discuss in detail the scene on pages 374-375 for reasons having to do with a proper and unspoiled experience of this fabulous novel, but I will say that they are perhaps the best two pages that I have read this year. More than any other passage in Teenager, 374-375 captures the kind of timeless love that Smith is after. They are masterful, and we are lucky to read them in our lifetime.
... encapsulates the specific and peculiar feeling of what if I just drove off, away from my life, with no real destination? stretched out for nearly 400 pages. It is a romp through the crisscrossing American highways and equally twisted minds of two teenagers...Their stories, both individual and intertwined, are sad from the very beginning, tinged with just enough desperation that 'leaving it all behind' seems a little more plausible than it does for the rest of us ... At first, from its description on the back, I was worried this novel was going to be another rose-colored-glasses, romanticized-open-road, driving-with-the-windows-down epic, with a rambling plot and long descriptions of the pastoral beauty of America. I was so wrong. Right from the beginning, this book warns you that it won’t fall into those tropes, and if it does, you’re right to be suspicious ... Smith manages to capture the innocence and idiocy of teenagerdom, while showing that trauma can make people grow up too fast ... The main characters are unbelievable — they’re just written a little too wildly to really ring true. But in a way, that makes them all the more real. Even just three years out of my teenage years, I already feel like it is decades away. In a book for an adult audience, the teenage years make sense when written as somewhat of a fever dream. More than that, though, a book about teenagers written for and by adults needs to tread carefully; don’t make them too mature, don’t make them too childlike. Smith toes that line, sometimes crossing too far to one side or the other, but overall, the book maintains its balancing act. Kody and Teal aren’t believable, but I think teenagers in general aren’t believable unless you actively are one ... The plot is just as warped as the characters it follows ... was not the book I expected it to be, and maybe that’s the best thing that could’ve happened. It wasn’t perfect, but its imperfections matched the messiness of its main characters and the slipperiness of the situation they’d gotten themselves into. And as a bonus, the ending at least partially resolved some of the complicated feelings I had about Kody’s often manipulative behavior towards Teal. While avoiding many of the pitfalls of an over-romanticized road trip novel, Smith still managed to capture some of the freedom and chaos of open skies that we all crave. Kody and Teal tear up their old lives and go on the lam from coast to coast so you don’t have to. This book allows you to gaze into the abyss of crushing possibility that opens up when you cut all ties with the world, and at the end of it all, leaves you feeling glad that you kept the distance of ink and pages between yourself and Kody and Teal’s adventure.
Smith has mixed violence with fable to create this modern-day tall tale about two teens who love each other and say to hell with everything else ... It’s easy for the reader to be pulled into Kody's imagination along with Teal until a surprising moment of violence or sudden injury sends you back to reality. The juxtaposition of the teens’ actions versus their thoughts (Teal dreams of having a family in jail once they’re caught, children and grandchildren raised behind bars) emphasizes their youth and disconnection. A new American folktale with teeth.
Smith’s vibrant and violent debut novel captures the pain, ebullience, and illusions of a troubled young man’s adolescence ... Though a muddled resolution disappoints, there are plenty of mythic motifs and pithy insights, and the author evokes the surreal contrasts of the American landscape in smart, jittery prose. Smith makes this a trip worth taking.
