Well, the book is out, and I didn’t wait till Christmas. Don’t know when I’ll have a chance to read it from start to finish, but I have it.
Again I express my respect for the family of Charles Schulz, and their honest and understandable objections, complaints and concerns about this book; but having said that, it’s obvious from even a quick glance that it contains much more basic information than I have ever read before. For example …
Charles and Joyce
(p. 223) In 1948, the nineteen-year-old Joyce had run off to New Mexico, fallen in love with a cowboy, married, gotten pregnant, been abandoned by her husband, and come home to Minneapolis to have the child — all within 20 months. When Sparky met her at a party, Joyce was twenty-two years old, divorced, with a baby and a curfew. Pulled away from a pretty face was her strawberry-blond hair.
He found her doing the dishes at her sister’s kitchen sink, and came over to help.
I strongly encourage you to read Nat Gertler’s commentary at The AAUGH! Blog. A couple more items about the book worth reading are a review in The New Yorker by author John Updike, and Newsweek’s take on the thing.
I can see the effect he was trying for, and it can be spoken effectively, but it reads awkwardly. It should be, “Her strawberry-blond hair was pulled away from her pretty face.”
“Pulled away from her face was her pretty, strawberry-blond hair” is a terribly awkward sentence. My college freshman writing teacher would have scratched it right out!