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Looking for Jack Kerouac
It wasn't Duke Walczak's fault that I took off for Florida, like Kathy thought. The truth is, we started getting sideways with each other on our class trip to New York and Washington D.C. nearly a year earlier—which, looking back, is ironic since she was the one dead set on going.
From the author of Wish You Were Here andStranded in Harmony (American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults), and Vermeer's Daughter (a School Library Journal Best Adult Book for Young Adults).
In 1964, Paul Carpetti discovers Jack Kerouac's On the Road while on a school trip to New York and begins to question the life he faces after high school. Then he meets a volatile, charismatic Kerouac devotee determined to hit the road himself. When the boys learn that Kerouac is living in St. Petersburg, Florida, they go looking for answers.
Barbara Shoup is the author of seven novels and the co-author of two books about the fiction craft. She is the recipient of numerous grants from the Indiana Arts Council, two creative renewal grants from the Arts Council of Indianapolis, the 2006 PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship, and the 2012 Eugene and Marilyn Glick Regional Indiana Author Award. She was the writer-in-residence at Broad Ripple High School Center for the Humanities and the Performing Arts in Indianapolis for twenty years. Currently, she is the executive director of the Indiana Writers Center.
From the author of Wish You Were Here andStranded in Harmony (American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults), and Vermeer's Daughter (a School Library Journal Best Adult Book for Young Adults).
In 1964, Paul Carpetti discovers Jack Kerouac's On the Road while on a school trip to New York and begins to question the life he faces after high school. Then he meets a volatile, charismatic Kerouac devotee determined to hit the road himself. When the boys learn that Kerouac is living in St. Petersburg, Florida, they go looking for answers.
Barbara Shoup is the author of seven novels and the co-author of two books about the fiction craft. She is the recipient of numerous grants from the Indiana Arts Council, two creative renewal grants from the Arts Council of Indianapolis, the 2006 PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship, and the 2012 Eugene and Marilyn Glick Regional Indiana Author Award. She was the writer-in-residence at Broad Ripple High School Center for the Humanities and the Performing Arts in Indianapolis for twenty years. Currently, she is the executive director of the Indiana Writers Center.
184 pages, Paperback
First published July 28, 2014
4 people are currently reading
651 people want to read
About the author
Barbara Shoup
22 books39 followersBarbara Shoup is the author of eight novels for adults and young adults, most recently An American Tune and Looking for Jack Kerouac, as well as a memoir, A Commotion in Your Heart: Notes about Writing and Life. She is the co-author of Novel Ideas: Contemporary Authors Share the Creative Process and Story Matters., as well as in The Writer and the New York Times travel section. Her young adult novels, Wish You Were Here and Stranded in Harmony were selected as American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults. The recipient of the PEN Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Fellowship and grants from the Indiana Arts Commission, she is the Writer-in-Residence at the Indiana Writers Center and a faculty member at Art Workshop International.
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
November 30, 2014
Oh, what a gorgeous book about growing up and being held back by life and grief and desire until the urge to move and break free becomes too much. I just loved it. So many dog-eared pages, but none more so as toward the end when Paul starts to come into himself and realize that those he holds in the highest esteem are quite possibly the most damaged: "It's the noise of the world escalating in his increasingly frantic attempts to drown out the inner voice saying, You will never stop grieving for what you've lost," which is essentially what we realize as we become adults and yet, we can get to the point Paul does at the end of the novel where even within that knowledge there is the possibility for happiness, especially in recapturing that one perfect moment. It's a beautiful book.
October 22, 2020
Young adult novel about a young man’s adventure the year after graduating high school. He is a drifter for sure, and as the title says, he was looking for the author Jack Kerouac. He was awed by Jack Kerouac‘s book, on the road, as a senior in high school and made it his life mission to meet the author. On the way he has many an adventure as well as meets some critical people and friends who help him in his personal development as a young man.
July 14, 2017
This is an awesome book. Two older teenage boys kind of lost in life, each in their own different way, go on a road trip with high expectations. Nothing turns out the way they expect which is what makes this so interesting. Nice book to get lost in for a few days!
April 9, 2018
Simple coming of age book with good characters and of course more than a nod to Kerouac and his famous novel “On the road”
Enjoyable read for fans of the beat novel
Enjoyable read for fans of the beat novel
October 9, 2015
Looking for Jack Kerouac starts out in East Chicago, Indiana in 1960s, but naturally, it becomes a book about a road trip. What else can we expect from a book that invokes the author of On the Road and has classic cars on its cover? This is a trip you want to take, Esteemed Reader, and one I'm sorry to have finished so soon. I absolutely loved this book. I loved that it never condescends to its reader or attempts to patch a solution onto a situation for which there isn't one and I love that its honest and eloquent in its execution.
Paul Carpetti is in a period of transition many of us older readers will remember well. He's just graduated high school and now he's faced with the big question: what next? His mother has died just before the start of the novel and his girlfriend has moved to take her place as much as possible. She's got plans for Paul to be her husband and father of 2.5 kids with a home in the suburbs and all the rest of it. Paul simply needs to show up to work at his dead-end job, put his brain on autopilot, and everything will simply fall into place for him.
Naturally, it's time for him to get out of town. His reasons for needing a road adventure are myriad, but number one on his list is the love of a great novel, which makes him my kind of protagonist:
I wanted like Sal wanted, too—I didn’t even know what I wanted. I just wanted. Maybe everything. It was like an ache sometimes, that wanting. I never mentioned it. There wasn’t a single person in my life who’d have understood, even if I had been able to explain it—and I doubted I could. But lost in the pages of On the Road, I felt like…myself. Like the book knew who I was, knew what I wanted, and was speaking back to me somehow.
Actually, it Paul's new friend Duke Walczak I most identified with. He's got a head full of "dangerous" new ideas, the makings of a future alcoholic, and a dream of being a writer. Paul's girlfriend sees Duke for what he is from the start: trouble. The story is a bit hard on old Duke, and to be fair, he's cruising for a bruising, but I felt more of a kinship to Duke as he reminded me of a foolish young Ninja I once knew many years ago:) Duke's the one who learns Jack Kerouac is hiding out in Florida through an obituary listing and his motives in seeking out the great writer are far less altruistic than Paul's, though I personally found them more relatable:
“It’s all there, ready to be made into the Great American Novel,” he said. The main character, Duke himself, was going to be named Jack Bliss, he said—Jack, of course. I was in it, too. Rocco Minetti.
“Rocco Minetti?” I said. “That’s idiotic. Jesus. Don’t name me that.”
“Rocco Minetti,” Duke repeated, firmly. “My book. My characters. You’ll like it just fine when you get famous because of it. Like Kerouac’s buddies did.”
“Yeah, right,” I said.
“You think that won’t happen? Hey! Put your money on it, man. It’s been ‘mutely and beautifully and purely decided.’ What I’m going to write in those Big Chiefs, starting today, will make Jack Kerouac look like old news.”
“If you think that, how come you’re so hot to find him?” I asked.
“To pay homage, man,” he said, indignantly. “To stand before him and, you know, get his blessing to carry the torch.”
The fellas hitchhike their way south, along the way encountering interesting people such as a sexy mermaid (a performer in a tail, not Ariel) in a convertible sports car who likes to party. And there's another girl later in the book, who may or may not be of particular interest to our heroes, and a certain famous writer who may or may not put in an appearance, though it would be spoiling to tell. Given that his name is in the title, it would be sort of weird if Jack Kerouac didn't show up, but maybe it's just a weird book--I'm not going to spoil it:)
One of my favorite of Paul and Duke's many encounters is a trucker named Bud:
“You got a truck, you got a rolling motel room.” He gestured over his shoulder, to a built-in bed between the seat and the back window.
“You’ll notice, the wife even made me up some nice throw pillows.” He winked. “I’m going to tell you something, boys: In addition to all its other benefits, trucking is the secret to a happy marriage.”
“How’s that?” Duke asked.
“Simple,” Bud said. “You’re gone a lot, you see the world. You romance the occasional lady who doesn’t expect anything but a nice steak dinner and a few drinks for a roll in the hay. So you come home and find out the wife’s gone overboard with the Sears Roebuck catalogue? It’s a small price to pay to dodge the nine-to-five grind, coming home to tuna casserole, whiny kids, and mowing the grass every Saturday morning. There’s damn good money in it, too—if you can put together enough to get your own rig.”
What a charming fella that Bud is:) But the boys don't buy it:
But when Bud dropped us at a truck stop a few miles south of Clarksville and pulled into the truckers’ parking lot to sleep, Duke shook his head and laughed. “Poor old Bud. He thinks he’s got it knocked, but he’s just kidding himself. His leash is just longer than most other guys’, that’s all.”
Looking for Jack Kerouac is a fascinating read and worthy of closer examination, which I intend to give it, the way I might re-watch a magic trick in slow motion to catch the magician at work. One of the things I like about Bud is even though I wasn't alive in the sixties, I've met him. I've heard a similar spiel from truckers. But I picked his passage in particular because I believe its an example of Barbara Shoup at work.
Thematically, marriage is shown again and again throughout the novel as a force of coming unhappiness (better throw up an example), the likes of which I haven't encountered since Revolutionary Road:
I flipped the TV channels for a while, coming up with nothing but moronic shows that only housewives would watch, which reminded me of dinner at Kathy’s house the night before. Mrs. Benson falling all over herself re-filling my plate of meatloaf, making sure I was happy in every possible way in between nagging Mr. Benson to death about chores that, if you listened to her, had to be done ten seconds after dinner was over, or the whole house was going to fall down around us. The sheepish grin Mr. Benson cast my way when she wasn’t looking, as if to say get used to it, buddy, a few years from now this will be you.
Paul's reason for skipping town in the first place is to avoid being herded into marriage. As I read, I couldn't help but notice the absence of any strong female characters except the conniving girlfriend and the overall picture painted of females is not particularly positive until late in the novel. I found myself thinking of how the female writers in my critique group would come after me if I turned in such a manuscript, and here this book was written by not-a-dude:)
But as usual, I was missing the point and was later amused to find myself genuinely challenged by a clever story. After all, the world is presented to us from the limited perspective of one Paul Carpetti. Barbara Shoup may or may not be a marriage enthusiast, but Paul has reason to fear marriage and women. It was a woman who hurt him and he's so very, very angry:
I was done feeling guilty about having a little fun, I decided. Seriously. I was so frigging tired of doing the right thing. Where had it gotten me? Where did it get my mom? Or my dad, for that matter? He was nuts about Mom, he treated her like a queen, and all he got was a broken heart.
If you're the sort of reader who needs to be spoon fed, Looking for Jack Kerouac may not be for you. But if you yearn for a more adult story about a young adult coming of age, Barbara Shoup has crafted a rewarding tale I'm glad to have read and am looking forward to rereading.
I should end my review there as it's really long, but I can't finish without commenting on Shoup's treatment of history. There's a bit of nostalgia for an era gone by--isn't that the fun part of reading a Jack-Kerouac-themed road trip novel? But it's tempered with an unblinking view of that world as it was:
“Y’all do not want to be hitchhiking down through Georgia at night,” he said. “Niggers around here have gone plumb crazy.”
“I’m not afraid of Negroes,” Duke said, stressing the correct pronunciation. “I’ve got friends back home who are Negroes.”
“This ain’t the North, son,” Darnell said. “I got nothing against them myself—and it ain’t so much them you got to worry about, anyway. You know what happened to them friendly white boys in Mississippi this summer, don’t you? You want to end up like that?”
Duke shrugged. But I’d read about shootings and lynchings by the Klan and by the police, too, who were likely to assume that two guys obviously from the North, like Duke and me, had come down to cause trouble, as they saw it.
It would've been perhaps easier to give us the 1960s lite, but less honest. Kudos to Shoup for having the courage to report the facts, including the rebellious ideas that were brewing in the citizenry. Duke has his suspicions that the Gulf of Tonkin was "a big scam to crank things up over there" in Vietnam and he suspects that maybe, just maybe, Oswald had help executing our President. You know I'm a conspiracy nut, Esteemed Reader, and I've told you Duke is the character I liked most. But it's quite something to see those events through the eyes of someone who lived through them and knew his government was lying to him. It shapes a very different view of history than the one we're taught in schools. Thank goodness all of that happened in the distant past and in no way impacts our present life.
In conclusion, Looking for Jack Kerouac is a terrific book to be enjoyed by readers of all ages:) As always, I'll leave you with some of my favorite passages from Looking for Jack Kerouac:
You couldn’t be halfway married any more than you could be halfway dead.
“Yeah, I was scared. So what? Hemingway said courage is being scared and doing the right thing, anyway. Did you know that?”
“Hemingway blew his brains out,” I said. “What kind of courage is that?”
I walked slowly, weaving a little, stopping to look in the window of a souvenir shop or listen to music drifting out from the other honkey-tonks. The bars were mostly set up like Tootsies, with a band in the front window. Framed by the open doorways, people writhed in the neon light, looking weirdly like the pictures of hell the nuns showed us in grade school to scare us straight.
“Jack Kerouac. The writer. He lives here, in St. Petersburg. Me and my buddy here, we’re looking for him.”
“Writer. No, I don’t know any writers. G.D. Reds, most of them.”
A guy at a nearby table glanced up from the newspaper he was reading. Disheveled, unshaven, not quite clean, he looked a lot like the guys we’d seen in Morris Park the day before. There were others, too, their heads bent over books or newspapers, their dirty green army surplus duffels at their feet—and it occurred to me that whatever had deposited them in this place, rootless, without purpose, might have seemed like a grand adventure at the start
Paul Carpetti is in a period of transition many of us older readers will remember well. He's just graduated high school and now he's faced with the big question: what next? His mother has died just before the start of the novel and his girlfriend has moved to take her place as much as possible. She's got plans for Paul to be her husband and father of 2.5 kids with a home in the suburbs and all the rest of it. Paul simply needs to show up to work at his dead-end job, put his brain on autopilot, and everything will simply fall into place for him.
Naturally, it's time for him to get out of town. His reasons for needing a road adventure are myriad, but number one on his list is the love of a great novel, which makes him my kind of protagonist:
I wanted like Sal wanted, too—I didn’t even know what I wanted. I just wanted. Maybe everything. It was like an ache sometimes, that wanting. I never mentioned it. There wasn’t a single person in my life who’d have understood, even if I had been able to explain it—and I doubted I could. But lost in the pages of On the Road, I felt like…myself. Like the book knew who I was, knew what I wanted, and was speaking back to me somehow.
Actually, it Paul's new friend Duke Walczak I most identified with. He's got a head full of "dangerous" new ideas, the makings of a future alcoholic, and a dream of being a writer. Paul's girlfriend sees Duke for what he is from the start: trouble. The story is a bit hard on old Duke, and to be fair, he's cruising for a bruising, but I felt more of a kinship to Duke as he reminded me of a foolish young Ninja I once knew many years ago:) Duke's the one who learns Jack Kerouac is hiding out in Florida through an obituary listing and his motives in seeking out the great writer are far less altruistic than Paul's, though I personally found them more relatable:
“It’s all there, ready to be made into the Great American Novel,” he said. The main character, Duke himself, was going to be named Jack Bliss, he said—Jack, of course. I was in it, too. Rocco Minetti.
“Rocco Minetti?” I said. “That’s idiotic. Jesus. Don’t name me that.”
“Rocco Minetti,” Duke repeated, firmly. “My book. My characters. You’ll like it just fine when you get famous because of it. Like Kerouac’s buddies did.”
“Yeah, right,” I said.
“You think that won’t happen? Hey! Put your money on it, man. It’s been ‘mutely and beautifully and purely decided.’ What I’m going to write in those Big Chiefs, starting today, will make Jack Kerouac look like old news.”
“If you think that, how come you’re so hot to find him?” I asked.
“To pay homage, man,” he said, indignantly. “To stand before him and, you know, get his blessing to carry the torch.”
The fellas hitchhike their way south, along the way encountering interesting people such as a sexy mermaid (a performer in a tail, not Ariel) in a convertible sports car who likes to party. And there's another girl later in the book, who may or may not be of particular interest to our heroes, and a certain famous writer who may or may not put in an appearance, though it would be spoiling to tell. Given that his name is in the title, it would be sort of weird if Jack Kerouac didn't show up, but maybe it's just a weird book--I'm not going to spoil it:)
One of my favorite of Paul and Duke's many encounters is a trucker named Bud:
“You got a truck, you got a rolling motel room.” He gestured over his shoulder, to a built-in bed between the seat and the back window.
“You’ll notice, the wife even made me up some nice throw pillows.” He winked. “I’m going to tell you something, boys: In addition to all its other benefits, trucking is the secret to a happy marriage.”
“How’s that?” Duke asked.
“Simple,” Bud said. “You’re gone a lot, you see the world. You romance the occasional lady who doesn’t expect anything but a nice steak dinner and a few drinks for a roll in the hay. So you come home and find out the wife’s gone overboard with the Sears Roebuck catalogue? It’s a small price to pay to dodge the nine-to-five grind, coming home to tuna casserole, whiny kids, and mowing the grass every Saturday morning. There’s damn good money in it, too—if you can put together enough to get your own rig.”
What a charming fella that Bud is:) But the boys don't buy it:
But when Bud dropped us at a truck stop a few miles south of Clarksville and pulled into the truckers’ parking lot to sleep, Duke shook his head and laughed. “Poor old Bud. He thinks he’s got it knocked, but he’s just kidding himself. His leash is just longer than most other guys’, that’s all.”
Looking for Jack Kerouac is a fascinating read and worthy of closer examination, which I intend to give it, the way I might re-watch a magic trick in slow motion to catch the magician at work. One of the things I like about Bud is even though I wasn't alive in the sixties, I've met him. I've heard a similar spiel from truckers. But I picked his passage in particular because I believe its an example of Barbara Shoup at work.
Thematically, marriage is shown again and again throughout the novel as a force of coming unhappiness (better throw up an example), the likes of which I haven't encountered since Revolutionary Road:
I flipped the TV channels for a while, coming up with nothing but moronic shows that only housewives would watch, which reminded me of dinner at Kathy’s house the night before. Mrs. Benson falling all over herself re-filling my plate of meatloaf, making sure I was happy in every possible way in between nagging Mr. Benson to death about chores that, if you listened to her, had to be done ten seconds after dinner was over, or the whole house was going to fall down around us. The sheepish grin Mr. Benson cast my way when she wasn’t looking, as if to say get used to it, buddy, a few years from now this will be you.
Paul's reason for skipping town in the first place is to avoid being herded into marriage. As I read, I couldn't help but notice the absence of any strong female characters except the conniving girlfriend and the overall picture painted of females is not particularly positive until late in the novel. I found myself thinking of how the female writers in my critique group would come after me if I turned in such a manuscript, and here this book was written by not-a-dude:)
But as usual, I was missing the point and was later amused to find myself genuinely challenged by a clever story. After all, the world is presented to us from the limited perspective of one Paul Carpetti. Barbara Shoup may or may not be a marriage enthusiast, but Paul has reason to fear marriage and women. It was a woman who hurt him and he's so very, very angry:
I was done feeling guilty about having a little fun, I decided. Seriously. I was so frigging tired of doing the right thing. Where had it gotten me? Where did it get my mom? Or my dad, for that matter? He was nuts about Mom, he treated her like a queen, and all he got was a broken heart.
If you're the sort of reader who needs to be spoon fed, Looking for Jack Kerouac may not be for you. But if you yearn for a more adult story about a young adult coming of age, Barbara Shoup has crafted a rewarding tale I'm glad to have read and am looking forward to rereading.
I should end my review there as it's really long, but I can't finish without commenting on Shoup's treatment of history. There's a bit of nostalgia for an era gone by--isn't that the fun part of reading a Jack-Kerouac-themed road trip novel? But it's tempered with an unblinking view of that world as it was:
“Y’all do not want to be hitchhiking down through Georgia at night,” he said. “Niggers around here have gone plumb crazy.”
“I’m not afraid of Negroes,” Duke said, stressing the correct pronunciation. “I’ve got friends back home who are Negroes.”
“This ain’t the North, son,” Darnell said. “I got nothing against them myself—and it ain’t so much them you got to worry about, anyway. You know what happened to them friendly white boys in Mississippi this summer, don’t you? You want to end up like that?”
Duke shrugged. But I’d read about shootings and lynchings by the Klan and by the police, too, who were likely to assume that two guys obviously from the North, like Duke and me, had come down to cause trouble, as they saw it.
It would've been perhaps easier to give us the 1960s lite, but less honest. Kudos to Shoup for having the courage to report the facts, including the rebellious ideas that were brewing in the citizenry. Duke has his suspicions that the Gulf of Tonkin was "a big scam to crank things up over there" in Vietnam and he suspects that maybe, just maybe, Oswald had help executing our President. You know I'm a conspiracy nut, Esteemed Reader, and I've told you Duke is the character I liked most. But it's quite something to see those events through the eyes of someone who lived through them and knew his government was lying to him. It shapes a very different view of history than the one we're taught in schools. Thank goodness all of that happened in the distant past and in no way impacts our present life.
In conclusion, Looking for Jack Kerouac is a terrific book to be enjoyed by readers of all ages:) As always, I'll leave you with some of my favorite passages from Looking for Jack Kerouac:
You couldn’t be halfway married any more than you could be halfway dead.
“Yeah, I was scared. So what? Hemingway said courage is being scared and doing the right thing, anyway. Did you know that?”
“Hemingway blew his brains out,” I said. “What kind of courage is that?”
I walked slowly, weaving a little, stopping to look in the window of a souvenir shop or listen to music drifting out from the other honkey-tonks. The bars were mostly set up like Tootsies, with a band in the front window. Framed by the open doorways, people writhed in the neon light, looking weirdly like the pictures of hell the nuns showed us in grade school to scare us straight.
“Jack Kerouac. The writer. He lives here, in St. Petersburg. Me and my buddy here, we’re looking for him.”
“Writer. No, I don’t know any writers. G.D. Reds, most of them.”
A guy at a nearby table glanced up from the newspaper he was reading. Disheveled, unshaven, not quite clean, he looked a lot like the guys we’d seen in Morris Park the day before. There were others, too, their heads bent over books or newspapers, their dirty green army surplus duffels at their feet—and it occurred to me that whatever had deposited them in this place, rootless, without purpose, might have seemed like a grand adventure at the start
April 20, 2022
The first book I picked up in months that I officially tuned out during. I read many reviews on Goodreads saying how great this book was, but I just don’t see it.
Though coming-of-age novels thrive on simplicity and paying homage to their influences, Barbara Shoup’s “Looking for Jack Kerouac” is too simple. Though well-intended, it drags within the first 60 pages, which is not a great sign.
I wanted to like this book, I really did. But when the characters are this uninteresting and typical of the genre, that’s where you lose the reader. Sorry, Barbara Shoup. I passed on this one.
Though coming-of-age novels thrive on simplicity and paying homage to their influences, Barbara Shoup’s “Looking for Jack Kerouac” is too simple. Though well-intended, it drags within the first 60 pages, which is not a great sign.
I wanted to like this book, I really did. But when the characters are this uninteresting and typical of the genre, that’s where you lose the reader. Sorry, Barbara Shoup. I passed on this one.
June 3, 2018
Wow, great book. Not even sure where to begin, except Barbara Shoup captures life in this story. Strong characters that the reader doesn't want to lose when the story comes to the end. An emotional story that impacts the reader. After you turn the last page, you will want to know more about Paul's life, and you'll wish him success.
August 31, 2018
This is a young adult novel but I really enjoyed it. It is well written and a fun read.
March 3, 2017
Coming into this book, I had never read Jack Kerouac's "On The Road". I kind of knew what it was about, but was a little worried that my literary ignorance would affect my understanding of "Looking For Jack Kerouac". Luckily, Kerouac's work is NOT a prerequisite for enjoying this novel!
For a basic plot summary, this tale sees two young men in 1964 wondering what to do with their lives. Paul feels trapped by a dysfunctional family and a smothering girlfriend, while Duke just wants to light out for the open road. After "hearing tell" that Kerouac (author of the book they both revere) resides in Florida, Paul and Duke decide to pay him a visit. What they find may be surprising, but a book like this is all about the journey anyway.
What really compels the reader to keep turning the pages of "Looking for Jack Kerouac" is how author Barbara Shoup develops the lead character (Paul) and makes you CARE about how/where he will end up. The supporting characters are nice too, but this is really Paul's story and he is the reason why readers will stick around for the conclusion. There's a little bit of Paul in all young men, I think, and that is what makes him so interesting.
Overall, I found this an enjoyable read. Nothing epic or anything like that, but just a thoughtful story that will have you pondering your own life while you read it. Oddly enough, I feel like I don't necessarily even NEED to read Kerouac's original after reading this one. I feel satisfied with what Shoup describes and the mirror story she weaves.
For a basic plot summary, this tale sees two young men in 1964 wondering what to do with their lives. Paul feels trapped by a dysfunctional family and a smothering girlfriend, while Duke just wants to light out for the open road. After "hearing tell" that Kerouac (author of the book they both revere) resides in Florida, Paul and Duke decide to pay him a visit. What they find may be surprising, but a book like this is all about the journey anyway.
What really compels the reader to keep turning the pages of "Looking for Jack Kerouac" is how author Barbara Shoup develops the lead character (Paul) and makes you CARE about how/where he will end up. The supporting characters are nice too, but this is really Paul's story and he is the reason why readers will stick around for the conclusion. There's a little bit of Paul in all young men, I think, and that is what makes him so interesting.
Overall, I found this an enjoyable read. Nothing epic or anything like that, but just a thoughtful story that will have you pondering your own life while you read it. Oddly enough, I feel like I don't necessarily even NEED to read Kerouac's original after reading this one. I feel satisfied with what Shoup describes and the mirror story she weaves.
June 21, 2016
Paul is a young man from the Chicago area that found a book that changed his life on a class trip to New York. That book was On the Road. Shortly after Paul’s discovery of the banned and life changing book, Paul’s mother is diagnosed with a brain tumor. She dies during the spring of his senior year of high school. Paul feels trapped by greif, a clingy girlfriend, and a 3rd shift mill job. Paul and his new friend from work ,Duke, head out to find Jack Kerouac where he now lives in Florida with his mother. The boys hitch hike from Illinois to Florida in Kerouac style.
I was drawn to this book by the title. As a young adult, I fell in love with the Beats. I still have a deep fondness for Kerouac, Kesey, and Ginsburg like one is still is deeply fond of the music that was popular from the days of high school or a first love. It is as if the title said, “Shoup wrote this for you so you can reminisce.”
I was not drawn into the tale at the beginning as I had hoped. I actually remember even feeling anger for a bit when the author seemed to confuse Beats and Beatniks. That is not cool. Kerouac would not approve. I felt the first ½ of the novel was a rewrite of On the Road. I almost abandoned the book all together. However, I was wrong very wrong. As the novel progressed, I began to see that all the misconceptions about the Beats and the confusion between the Beat generation and the Beatniks was a clever literary rouse, so was the ridiculous attempt at recreated the adventures of On the Road. What I found once I put away my false first impression was a well written and cleverly devised tale of coming of age and finding yourself.
Paul found Jack Kerouac. The real Jack Kerouac. This novel is set in 1963. By this time, the author, famous for his drifter lifestyle and spontaneous prose, was well into his alcohol and drug induced decline that ended his life in 1969 at the age of 47. Paul realizes that he does not want to be stuck in the mill, married right out of high school, with a suburban house, but he doesn’t want to follow in Jack’s footsteps either.
Though I loved this novel and was drawn to it by the title, I fear that I am in the minority rather than majority. I think that the title will not speak to YA readers. Very few teens will even have heard of the Beats and Kerouac.
I recommend this novel for 10th grade and up. Like the novel that inspired it, it is full of foul language, sex, and partying. There is a reason On the Road was controversial.
I was drawn to this book by the title. As a young adult, I fell in love with the Beats. I still have a deep fondness for Kerouac, Kesey, and Ginsburg like one is still is deeply fond of the music that was popular from the days of high school or a first love. It is as if the title said, “Shoup wrote this for you so you can reminisce.”
I was not drawn into the tale at the beginning as I had hoped. I actually remember even feeling anger for a bit when the author seemed to confuse Beats and Beatniks. That is not cool. Kerouac would not approve. I felt the first ½ of the novel was a rewrite of On the Road. I almost abandoned the book all together. However, I was wrong very wrong. As the novel progressed, I began to see that all the misconceptions about the Beats and the confusion between the Beat generation and the Beatniks was a clever literary rouse, so was the ridiculous attempt at recreated the adventures of On the Road. What I found once I put away my false first impression was a well written and cleverly devised tale of coming of age and finding yourself.
Paul found Jack Kerouac. The real Jack Kerouac. This novel is set in 1963. By this time, the author, famous for his drifter lifestyle and spontaneous prose, was well into his alcohol and drug induced decline that ended his life in 1969 at the age of 47. Paul realizes that he does not want to be stuck in the mill, married right out of high school, with a suburban house, but he doesn’t want to follow in Jack’s footsteps either.
Though I loved this novel and was drawn to it by the title, I fear that I am in the minority rather than majority. I think that the title will not speak to YA readers. Very few teens will even have heard of the Beats and Kerouac.
I recommend this novel for 10th grade and up. Like the novel that inspired it, it is full of foul language, sex, and partying. There is a reason On the Road was controversial.
August 2, 2014
I received a free copy from the publishers via Edelweiss.
Looking for Jack Kerouac begins with Paul finding Kerouac's book, On The Road, and finding an instant connection with it. It becomes his favourite book. After high school, when life doesn't turn out as planned, Paul finds himself in a place in his life he doesn't really want to be. When he meets the charismatic and opinionated Duke who is also a lover of Kerouac's work, Paul finds himself on a road-trip to St. Petersburg, Florida to look for Jack Kerouac. Paul finds much more than Jack Kerouac though, he finds himself.
Looking for Jack Kerouac is a great coming of age, YA historical realistic fiction. One of my favourite things that I enjoyed about Looking for Jack Kerouac is that it had some great and memorable characters (my favourite was Ginny).
The reason that this is getting 3 stars instead of 4 is because I found it difficult to connect with Paul (the protagonist), but others may have no problem especially if they are dealing with some difficult choices and not knowing what to do with their life.
The writing is easy to read and captures your attention from the beginning. It's also only a small book so you fly through it.
I would recommend to fans of realistic fiction and coming of age novels because Looking for Jack Kerouac is a great one. I would also recommend if you're a fan of the 60s because Looking for Jack Kerouac definitely has a genuine 60s feel to it.
Looking for Jack Kerouac begins with Paul finding Kerouac's book, On The Road, and finding an instant connection with it. It becomes his favourite book. After high school, when life doesn't turn out as planned, Paul finds himself in a place in his life he doesn't really want to be. When he meets the charismatic and opinionated Duke who is also a lover of Kerouac's work, Paul finds himself on a road-trip to St. Petersburg, Florida to look for Jack Kerouac. Paul finds much more than Jack Kerouac though, he finds himself.
Looking for Jack Kerouac is a great coming of age, YA historical realistic fiction. One of my favourite things that I enjoyed about Looking for Jack Kerouac is that it had some great and memorable characters (my favourite was Ginny).
The reason that this is getting 3 stars instead of 4 is because I found it difficult to connect with Paul (the protagonist), but others may have no problem especially if they are dealing with some difficult choices and not knowing what to do with their life.
The writing is easy to read and captures your attention from the beginning. It's also only a small book so you fly through it.
I would recommend to fans of realistic fiction and coming of age novels because Looking for Jack Kerouac is a great one. I would also recommend if you're a fan of the 60s because Looking for Jack Kerouac definitely has a genuine 60s feel to it.
June 21, 2016
In 1964, Paul has just graduated high school and is working the night shift at a steel factory. He spends his free time with his middle school girlfriend who has been training to be his future wife for years--something Paul isn't ready for. Instead, he is trying to figure out what he wants out of life. He is coming to age while trying to navigate various stressors, including the death of his mother to cancer and impending war. On a last class trip, he picked up Kerouac's On the Road book in NYC. The book speaks to him and he ends up going on a similar trip to Florida with a Dean type coworker named Duke. The road trip is full of hitchhiking and meeting interesting people--I particularly liked the mermaids. They are in Florida for a while before finally meeting their favorite author who disappoints them with his alcoholism and racism. After Duke sets off on another trip, Paul stays behind befriending a local family with a very likeable young female character, Ginny, who he becomes close to. He also spends more time with Kerouac who teaches him an important lessen to help him get through this somewhat aimless time in his life. Overall, it is a great young adult book for older teens that deals with loss, grief, and coming of age issues. As a bonus, it actually makes hanging out in FL sound appealing.
October 9, 2014
Spectacular!
If I had to use one word to describe this book, that would be it!
An intriguing, emotional and thought-provoking coming of age tale that will lift your spirits while tugging at your heart the whole way through. Shoup delivers a story that will hold you captive from page one, as you take to the road with Paul and Duke on a trip across the US that sees them come into contact with many different personalities, each with their own words of wisdom and advice, as well as having to face a number of different situations that left an impact on these two travelers, especially Paul, whose entire journey was one of self-discovery.
Well-paced and brilliantly written, this story played in my mind like a movie.
A story of love, friendship, heartache, desire and acceptance, this was an emotional rollercoaster ride, with many ups and downs, and a powerful message that will stay with me forever.
A stellar read with amazing characters who now each own a piece of my heart, this book deserves a place on the shelf with the greatest books of all time, some of which are mentioned in this story. Absolutely brilliant!
If I had to use one word to describe this book, that would be it!
An intriguing, emotional and thought-provoking coming of age tale that will lift your spirits while tugging at your heart the whole way through. Shoup delivers a story that will hold you captive from page one, as you take to the road with Paul and Duke on a trip across the US that sees them come into contact with many different personalities, each with their own words of wisdom and advice, as well as having to face a number of different situations that left an impact on these two travelers, especially Paul, whose entire journey was one of self-discovery.
Well-paced and brilliantly written, this story played in my mind like a movie.
A story of love, friendship, heartache, desire and acceptance, this was an emotional rollercoaster ride, with many ups and downs, and a powerful message that will stay with me forever.
A stellar read with amazing characters who now each own a piece of my heart, this book deserves a place on the shelf with the greatest books of all time, some of which are mentioned in this story. Absolutely brilliant!
August 17, 2014
After his mother dies and his feelings for his girlfriend wane, Paul Carpetti discovers Jack Kerouac's ON THE ROAD. Carpetti subsequently feels adrift in his hometown, bored with his factory job, rootless without the insider status of being a member of a high school (baseball and football) team and in need of a coming-of-age quest. When his friend Duke Walczak learns from a newspaper article that Jack Kerouac lives with his mother in St. Petersburg, Florida, the young men agree to hitchhike to St. Pete to meet their idol. Barbara Shoup's SEARCHING FOR JACK KEROUAC is Carpetti's physical road trip to his own internal growth. In the process, Carpetti wrestles with the nature of love, friendship, his relationship with his decent, grieving father and the nature of literary heroes. Toward the end of the book, Kerouac shares a keen insight with Carpetti, an affirmation that cuts through the insincere banalities we share with each other when confronted with grief and sorrow. Shoup's novel is labelled as a YA book but it speaks to adults as well.
October 1, 2014
At first I was kind of worried because I have never actually read anything by Jack Kerouac, thankfully I was pleasantly surprised to see that Barbara blends her novel with enough details that I never felt lost or that I was missing anything.
The story takes place in 1964 with two young men who have read Jack Kerouac's adventures, about learning on the road and exploring. Amidst fear of what comes after high school they begin to idolize the author.
When they realize that Jack Kerouac lives in Pensacola, Florida. Paul and Duke decide it's time to go in search of the man who has inspired them. Leaving their families and embracing a new set of fears they go out to discover their future!
High school is a scary time for anyone and I thought that author captured that upheaval so well. The story draws you in, Paul is definitely the focus and you care more about him then about Duke, but you still want to see how everything ends. How the boys will turn out in the end, the author makes you want to care about them.
The story takes place in 1964 with two young men who have read Jack Kerouac's adventures, about learning on the road and exploring. Amidst fear of what comes after high school they begin to idolize the author.
When they realize that Jack Kerouac lives in Pensacola, Florida. Paul and Duke decide it's time to go in search of the man who has inspired them. Leaving their families and embracing a new set of fears they go out to discover their future!
High school is a scary time for anyone and I thought that author captured that upheaval so well. The story draws you in, Paul is definitely the focus and you care more about him then about Duke, but you still want to see how everything ends. How the boys will turn out in the end, the author makes you want to care about them.
July 28, 2015
This novel is an example of an exploration of the existential conflict that arose from humanity’s attempts to find meaning in life. Paul Carpetti questioned his life, discovered Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and went looking for the author himself. All of this was triggered by the tragic death of his mother, which lead him to question his life’s path. But after the long journey to get to meet Kerouac, the man’s words were not the ones of comfort Paul expected after he explained about the death of his mother. Paul discovered that the wildness of the book is based on Jack losing his brother when he was a little boy because he never got over it. Kerouac knew that people never stop grieving for what they’ve lost. That was the absurdity discovered when Paul set out to find the meaning in life. In absurdist literature, it is believed that uncertainties and irreducible ambiguities were essential to the total impact.
November 1, 2014
What did the Beats look like to the generation of brainy, restless teens who were discovering their books all over mid-1960s America? For Paul and his adventurous new friend Duke, they represent the possibility of a more authentic life beyond the expectations of marriage, family, and a blue collar job at the mill. This clever novel follows their adventure as they make their way to Florida to meet Kerouac and figure out what to do with their lives. Some of the historical details feel like they're there for educational rather than narrative purposes, but overall there's a lot of imagination here and some richly drawn, engrossing characters. A quality YA novel I'll be glad to recommend to high schoolers this year.
August 14, 2014
I don't usually read YA books, but the title of this one intrigued me. The book was very sweet, about a boy named Paul who has just graduated high school and is also dealing with the sudden and painful loss of his mother. After reading Kerouac's On The Road, Paul decides to take off in search of Kerouac who is living in Florida. Much of the book involves the road trip and the search for the famous author. But once he finds Kerouac, the author is not at all what Paul expects. Overall, the book was okay. The ending was abrupt and not satisfying. I think this is a great idea for a book and it could have been better executed with a stronger ending.
November 9, 2014
I expected to like this book more, I like Jack Kerouac and I really enjoyed the start of the book. For me though the book seemed to drag on in places making it hard to stay fully in the story. The one aspect of the book that I liked consistently throughout the book was the authors descriptions of the settings. Overall this is probably worth reading but it just wasn't quite right for me.
October 25, 2015
If finding yourself comes at the cost of losing yourself to such heartache and pain, how many of us would proceed? This story illustrates how a guy had to risk losing home, gf, career, family, and future just to be able to look himself in the mirror. I'm there. Paul, come get me.
December 25, 2014
I was disappointed by this one. It started off great...ended ok. But the middle seemed to drag and drag.
January 31, 2016
just was not to my taste, but i had to read this for book club.
February 22, 2016
Achingly beautiful.
July 4, 2014
really good.
March 5, 2015
Fast-paced, hugely entertaining and surprising. Compelling coming-of-age story offers wise insight.
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