Our narrator, Gene Forrester, has returned to his old school grounds fifteen years after his graduation: John Knowles places his tree by the edge of a river near a school named Devon Academy.īecause our novel is written as a flashback, there are two very different images of this tree within the span of a page. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is not just found in Chapter 2 of Genesis.
And so, rather than craft a wholly new world of fantasy or space or illusion in which to wrestle with the questions of good and evil and the human heart, he plops his reader right down, in Chapter 1, in front of the tree. John Knowles, our author, knows his symbols. This is a novel about the loss of innocence, the discovery of evil, and the literal and spiritual fall of two teenage boys, which echoes a refrain found throughout literature: the refrain of a garden in Eden and a fall, from paradise to death, that began with a tree. Who knows but that you have come to a book for such a time as this?Īs our cover blurb tells us-and what a blurb that is!-this is not simply a novel about childhood friends. Especially in our times, and in this place. Wherever, or whether, you may have stumbled across A Separate Peace before, it is worth a re-read. Bridge to Terabithia, Where the Red Fern Grows, Of Mice and Men-really, what is wrong with school reading lists? Perhaps you remember a summer reading assignment you didn’t want to write an essay for, perhaps it’s lumped in your mind with all of those (spoiler alert) sad-books-you-read-at-school-where-someone-dies. You may have heard of the book A Separate Peace. Beginning with a tiny incident among ordinary boys, it ends by being as deep and as big as evil itself. I think it is the best-written, best-designed, and most moving novel I have read in many years. The author would like to thank her mother, who originally taught her this book. Please join us and read along! The book is available for purchase through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or IndieBound. Each week, we will publish a Mockingbird Reader’s Guide to a section of the novel. For the next few weeks, we will be doing a read-along of the novel A Separate Peace by John Knowles.
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