Accidental Brownie - A Childhood Memoir

Accidental Brownie comprises the tender, mostly factual, often very funny recollections of "an incredibly naive and honest kid" growing up in middle-class south Minneapolis during the fifties and sixties. His tales are populated by a memorable cast of exasperated parents, gimlet-eyed teachers, pretty but tragically inaccessible girls, and assorted mischief-makers, bullies, and oddballs, including the figurative "three-legged puppy"--literally a sweet, dull boy named Kermit--our hero feels compelled to protect. Relentlessly curious, obsessive, and well-intentioned, young Paul misses nothing, neither the quotidian details of neighborhood life nor the larger mysteries of his rapidly expanding universe, while fitfully discovering, in his rueful words, "that not everything my mother told me was true." --William Swanson, author of Stolen from the Garden: The Kidnapping of Virginia Piper Paul Froiland's finely crafted journey back in time and into the heart of the country beautifully captures those transformative years of childhood and adolescence, a time of innocence and exploration and confusion about where one is headed in the process of growing up. Told with humor and intelligence and a keen eye for universal truths about being young, these are stories that will delight readers and remind them of another part of life when everything seemed so much more mysterious and yet so very much simpler. --William Souder, author of Under a Wild Sky (Pulitzer Prize finalist), and most recently, On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson. With enormous humor and grace, Paul Froiland recalls his Minneapolis boyhood in the 1950s & '60s, a world of street corner negotiations and crocodile tears and Ike. Here we get a front-porch view of those days of navigating the shifting moral codes of siblings, parents, and neighbors, of a boy stumbling into new, unknown roles much like the country was beginning to do then. Accidental Brownie is filled with the often hilarious, always poignant uncertainties and discoveries of childhood, along with an irresistible sense that life is most precious and unstoppable in these tiny moments of beauty. --Betsy Brown, winner, National Poetry Series for Year of Morphine