@redreviews4you

 

Told by adult Adam looking back on the year he was twelve, this novella captures that delicate moment when innocence meets experience. Through his eyes, we see his first real crush, a growing awareness of the world around him, and the social tensions of the era — anti-Semitism, the Civil Rights Movement, and the lingering chill of the Red Scare.

 

Tekulsky writes with a reflective clarity that reminded me of Hemingway and Jean Shepherd (In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash). The use of popular songs as emotional markers gives the story a living pulse, connecting Adam’s “now” to the reader’s “now,” and bridging the late 1960s with today.

 

If you love shows like The Wonder Years or The Goldbergs, or coming-of-age classics like A Christmas Story or Stand By Me, this is a novella you’ll want to check out!
 

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​@readingpastdark.marcia

 

The Chestnut Tree by Mathew Tekulsky is a powerful coming-of-age story, one told through the eyes of Adam Jacobs. How quickly the reader engages with this youngster as he describes his home life, his view of the world around him, and especially his feelings. The writing is clear and profound, reminiscent of Virginia Woolf, where the focus is capturing the thoughts and feelings of the characters. The author has done an exemplary job in relating how deeply Jacobs is moved by occurrences, and he pulls back the curtain to reveal the adolescent’s hidden feelings, his fears, and his hopes. Political issues of the day are revealed, but it was the reasoning and inner thoughts of a 12-year-old that kept this reader turning the pages.

 

Sally Fletcher is his girlfriend, and a sweet and innocent romance develops, but he is Jewish, and she is Catholic. Can that ever work? Maybe between the two youngsters, but their families are a different matter.

 

My favorite parts are Adam’s interactions with Gladys McKinley, the neighborhood recluse, a blacklisted writer, who offers him hot chocolate, a listening ear, and solace beneath her chestnut tree.

 

Adam Jacobs is one who thinks deeply and feels intensely. This book made me wonder if, with age, I’ve lost the ability to do the same.

 

This novella, of only 145 pages, is a profound and thought-provoking read. Don’t miss it.

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Kirkus Reviews

In Tekulsky’s coming-of-age tale, a tween navigates cultural differences in his small Westchester County town while standing up for what he believes in. Set in late 1966, this bildungsroman portrays the journey of a 12-year-old boy as he experiences his first crushes, disagrees with his parents, and fights for what’s right. Adam Jacobs’ father is a German Jewish immigrant who escaped from a train headed for a concentration camp during World War II. As the book begins, Adam has a crush on Sally Fletcher, a Catholic girl in his grade at school. He and Sally become friends with blacklisted writer Gladys McKinley, their elderly neighbor, who provides them with sage advice and is engaged with civil rights activism. Through her, they meet the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. himself.

Working with Gladys and meeting King have a profound effect on Adam, who prints and passes out flyers protesting the Vietnam War as a mitzvah for his upcoming bar mitzvah. Throughout the novel, Adam confronts antisemitism, bullying, and hate with grace, and as the children stand up for their principles, their parents also begin to understand other points of view. Adam and Sally even inspire Adam’s dad to talk to their fellow students about his traumatic experience during the war. Adam succinctly summarizes the overarching message of the book, which is simple but engaging: “If you know that something is wrong, then it’s your duty to speak up about it.”

Although adults are clearly the intended audience for this book, readers aged 12 and up will easily understand, enjoy, and learn from its empowering story. An inspirational novel with engaging characters and an important message.

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BookTrib

 

Mathew Tekulsky‘s The Chestnut Tree tackles some of the biggest questions of a generation. Set in the fictional Westchester suburb of Beachmont during the fraught, electric years of 1966 and 1967, the story is narrated by twelve-year-old Adam, a dry cleaner’s son who is a lovestruck kid, budding photographer and aspiring writer. His crush on Sally blossoms into something richer: a story about friendship, mentorship, identity and the awakening of a moral conscience against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement.

 

Gladys McKinley is the reclusive, once-blacklisted children’s author living behind the chestnut tree of the title. Gladys is a widow still mourning her husband and a woman with ties to the era’s cultural and political currents who dispenses hot chocolate and hard truths about procrastination being “the curse of the writer” in the same breath. Through her, Adam and Sally get pulled into something bigger than themselves: printing anti-war flyers at the local newspaper, listening to advance copies of Peter, Paul and Mary records on Gladys’s turntable and eventually standing in the pews of Riverside Church to hear Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his landmark address against the Vietnam War. We see a child’s first stirrings of political awareness as the lens through which we experience 1967’s most consequential moments.

 

What makes the book work so well is how naturally Tekulsky braids the personal and the historical together. Adam’s story is full of details of growing up in that era including Playboy magazines smuggled into a reed clubhouse, transistor radios playing “Groovin'” and “Windy,” root beer handed out in a small-town newspaper’s print room and a 1964 Biscayne sedan bought through a family connection. At the same time, cultural touchstones such as Pete Seeger’s music, the Mets at Shea Stadium and Walter Cronkite’s war reports anchor the fiction in a vividly rendered historical moment. The novel trusts its young narrator’s voice to carry the weight of the era.

 

Adam is the son of a German-Jewish father who escaped the Holocaust, growing up self-conscious about his family’s accent and modest means in a neighborhood of doctors and lawyers. His preparation for his bar mitzvah runs alongside his political awakening, and the novel draws a parallel between the concept of “mitzvah” and the anti-war organizing he takes part in with Sally and Jimmy. Meanwhile, Sally’s Catholic upbringing and her parents’ political differences, and Jimmy’s status as the “slow kid” everyone underestimates, round out a small-town social world. Tekulsky never moralizes; he simply lets these kids ask honest questions about love, fairness, and courage, and lets the adults around them answer as best they can.

 

Tekulsky has a good ear for period dialogue and an even better sense of pacing. And the ending, with Adam heading off to summer camp having found both his voice as a writer and his first taste of real purpose is satisfying.

 

The Chestnut Tree is a real pleasure. It’s a book about how a twelve-year-old’s small, local acts of decency can connect him to the largest moral movements of his time. Tekulsky has written a love letter to first love, first courage and the writers and mentors who help us find our own words.