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Author name: Will Weaver

: Full Service
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Type of bind: Paperback
EAN num: 9780374400224
ISBN number: 0374400229
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 240
Printing Date: September 02, 2008
Publishing house: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Age index: Young Adult
Release Date: September 02, 2008
Sale Popularity Level: 1444322
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)



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Product Description:
The times they are a-changin' . . .
 
The summer that Paul turns sixteen his mother pushes him to take a job in town instead of just working on the family farm. “You need to meet the public,” she says, which is saying a lot for a woman deeply committed to the tightly knit religious community to which they belong. And meet the public Paul does: He meets Kirk, the angry gas station manager; Harry, a reclusive and kindly gangster; and a family of hippies passing in a orange peace van to San Francisco. He also meets beautiful Peggy, a high school sensation, and dark-haired Dale, her onthe-
side boyfriend who is headed to Vietnam. All of them come to the station – as well as girls on summer vacation, tanned and smelling of coconut oil, and ministers from Paul’s fundamentalist church, who are worried about his soul. As the summer progresses, Paul learns the secrets of his small Minnesota town and discovers that he’s ready to have a few secrets of his own.

With richly developed characters and a flair for arresting imagery, Will Weaver tells the story of the end of one boy’s innocence, unfolding at a time when the country as a whole is undergoing a difficult, deeply disturbing coming-of-age.




Customer Reviews
User popularity level: out of 5 stars

Rated by buyers 5 out of 5 stars - Sex & Existentialism For Teens
Full Service's characters feel real. The interactions feel like they matter. There is a plot arc but it doesn't dominate the book - instead the book unfolds a particular summer, a particular lens on how it goes in a small white town and the larger world. This particular lens has a lot to do with sexuality and making sense of the world. There are a couple subtle gay characters but the focus is on heterosexuality - and this is one of the few teen books I've read where the women and girls are just as lusty as the men and boys and aren't made to suffer G-d's wrath for it. This is one of the books where each character is rounded with a virtue and a problem. It reminded me of "Our Town" but less feeling of allegory and more the feeling you could know people like these.


Rated by buyers 5 out of 5 stars - A compelling, nostalgic, coming-of-age novel
In the summer of 1965, shy Paul Sutton, at the urging of his mother, takes a job at the local Shell gas station in the tourist town of Hawk Bend, Minnesota. Paul is a bit apprehensive about his new summer occupation, but nonetheless leaves the shadow of his family's religious farming community and goes to "meet the public." Paul's stint as a full-service gas attendant quickly becomes anything but a simple summer job.

First, there's Kirk, the angry gas station manager whose frequent "service calls" and narrow-minded opinions soon get him in more trouble than he can handle. Then there's Harry, a kind, older gentlemen who's still trying to escape his gangster past. And beautiful Peggy, whose torrid love triangle between her controlling boyfriend Stephen and dark-haired Dale --- Peggy's on-the-side lover who's headed for Vietnam --- snags Paul into its tangled web.

Along with the great expectations of his community's fundamentalist ministers, the family of hippies visiting Hawk Bend on their way to San Francisco, and the various tourists who pass through Shell Station, Paul finds himself dealing with the prospect of a new independent life or continuing to lead the odd quiet farm life in which he grew up.

FULL SERVICE is about a young man's rite of passage as the world he lives in is undergoing its tumultuous own coming of age. It's a strangely compelling, nostalgic novel that may make readers notice how much the world has changed and how they themselves may have changed as well.

--- Reviewed by Sarah Sawtelle ([...])


Rated by buyers 5 out of 5 stars - Richie's Picks: FULL SERVICE
" 'No, no, no,' she said impatiently, wiping her hands and turning down her radio, 'a real summer job--full-time. One where you could meet the public.'
"I glanced quickly through the screen door. 'What about Father?'
" 'I'll talk with him.'
"I shrugged. 'Yeah, well, what about the others?'
" 'For once let's not worry about the others,' she said. She turned back to her dishes, and her hands again moved into the soapy water as quick as trout among stones.
" 'The others' takes some explaining. We were a Midwestern family long on religion. Not Lutheran, but sort of. Not Mennonite, but kind of. Not Amish, but a little bit. Not Quaker, but a good part. It was a Christian nondenominational faith, a phrase mystifying to my few school friends who were not in it ('Come on, Sutton, how can a church have no name?'). Farmwork was communal. My family shared the larger machinery--baler, grain combine, corn picker, silo-filling equipment--with several other families in the Faith. Planting, haying, threshing, silo filling, corn picking were done on an orderly circuit: VandenEides, Grundlags, Sorheims, Suttons (that was us), and so on. Unlike the Mennonites in Canada or the Amish in central Minnesota, each family owned its own farm, but the focus was on shared work, worship, and fitting in with the others."

It's 1965, and Paul Sutton has spent his very first nearly-sixteen years pretty-well sheltered by life on the farm, and living among those families of the Faith. Tumultuous events elsewhere--the Civil Rights Movement, the War--seem like they're taking place in another world as heard through Paul's mom's little transistor radio. But Paul's life is about to get shaken up in a big way thanks to one of his mom's infamous "plans":

" 'All right. I'm listening,' my father said, though he really wasn't.

" 'First, Paul finds a job--a real job, one where he can meet the public--and then we hire someone to take up the slack here at home,' she said.
"My father reached for the bread He began to butter a piece. The silence went on. Finally he said, 'First, I don't know that Paul necessarily wants to work in town. Second, who could we find to take his place? There are no hired men anymore. But third, none of it really matters, because there aren't any jobs in Hawk Bend for farm kids. Town kids have them all.'
"There was silence. I looked down at my food.
" 'It must be nice to be right all the time,' my mother said.
"I sucked in a breath and held it."

"Well, I try my best
To be just like I am,
But everybody wants you
To be just like them."
--Minnesota native, Bob Dylan (1965), "Maggie's Farm"

Thirty or forty pages into reading FULL SERVICE, I found myself thinking back to such wonderful children's books as BECAUSE OF WINN-DIXIE, A YEAR DOWN YONDER, and THE CANNING SEASON. These thoughts did not spring from any belief that Will Weaver's new book is the appropriate subsequent read for the elementary school fans of those award-winning titles.

In fact, FULL SERVICE is a real sex, drugs, rock & roll, told-in-the-first-person, oft-rude, coming-of-age, YA novel that takes place back in '65.

But what Kate DiCamillo, Richard Peck, and Polly Horvath did so well with those books was to create unforgettable, multigenerational, ensemble casts of characters. And in FULL SERVICE, Will Weaver accomplishes this so exquisitely that I could easily imagine him writing another book about any one of, perhaps, a dozen different members of "the public" with whom Paul Sutton comes in contact as the result of landing a job at the Shell service station in downtown Hawk Bend, Minnesota (population 1,750) over that summer that he turns sixteen.

That list of characters begins with Paul's coworkers, Kirk and Bud. Kirk's the former high school jock with a wife, kids, and a rather healthy number of bad habits, as Paul quickly learns when he takes over manning the pumps at that full-service Shell station and starts meeting "the public."

"I met a local housewife with blonde hair piled high and sprayed in place. She seemed annoyed that I came out to wait on her, and she asked for fifty cents' worth of gas. She kept looking toward the office, the back room. 'Isn't Kirk on today?' she finally asked.
" 'Kirk is engaged by a service call.'
" 'I'll bet he is,' she said.
" 'Is there anything Bud or I might help you with?' I asked.
"She gave me a long look. 'Bud--it'd be a cold day in hell. And you--not for a couple of years.'
"My ears reddened like train semaphores.
"Unless you know furnaces, that is,' she said, raising one eyebrow at me.
" 'No, ma'am,' I stammered.
" 'There's the main boiler and then there's the pilot light,' she said, gesturing, drawing a circle with her hands.
"I nodded.
" 'Oh, you do know furnaces after all?' ... Read More


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