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  • First Kiss (Then Tell)
  • Karen Coats
Busby, Cylin , ed. First Kiss (Then Tell). Bloomsbury, 2008212p Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-59990-199-2$15.95 Paper ed. ISBN 978-1-59990-241-8$8.95 R Gr. 7-10

Seventeen-year-old Jonatan is unconscious in the emergency room, condition unknown, but this is not Jonatan's story; rather, it is the story of Guran, his estranged father. The father hasn't seen the son since the boy was five, and he takes this opportunity to fill Jonatan in on his history, starting with Guran's own experiences as a seventeen-year-old hippie in 1972 Sweden. Throughout the night, he recounts what amounts to a requiem for an age and an attitude; the story of the music, the protests, the lifestyle, the dream of a New Society achieved through people living, smoking, dropping acid and sleeping together unfolds through Guran's account of his early life and the years when he and Jonatan's mother lived together before having Jonatan, an account that drifts between storytelling and sermonizing, adulation and apology. Sometime in the night, Jonatan's girlfriend arrives, and eventually Jonatan's mother appears as well. When she realizes that Jonatan's girlfriend has likely been seduced by Guran's stories, she decides to cut through his purple haze with her own version, which casts the hippies as ineffectual dreamers, good for staging romantic protests and annoying capitalist fathers, but not much else. Though readers never get Jonatan's reaction to it (turns out he's just passed out from drinking too much after a fight—the details are left vague and thus smack of device), the story thus achieves fair and balanced accounting. Rather than plotted fiction, the accounts of Jonatan's parents are captivating oral history, important for giving two perspectives on how individuals and society might achieve social justice, and what factors might get in the way. The Swedish viewpoint gives a different slant than many American readers see on the turbulent era, and since many contemporary teens (and/or their parents) romanticize or are at least fascinated by this recent era in social and political history, this will likely find a small but committed readership.

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