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When Achilles Conroy and his brother Troy return from a tour of duty in Afghanistan, their white mother presents them with the key to their past: envelopes containing details about their respective birth parents. After Troy disappears, Achilles, always his brother's keeper, embarks on a harrowing journey in search of Troy, an experience that will change him forever.
Heartbreaking, intimate, and at times disturbing, Hold It 'Til It Hurts is a modern-day odyssey through war, adventure, disaster, and love, and explores how people who do not define themselves by race make sense of a world that does.
BookBrowse Review
"I wanted to like Hold 'til It Hurts. Yet I didn't, and this left me feeling that I, the reader, was the one to blame. The story wasn't what I had expected, likely a case of my misplaced assumptions from reading the book's summary and several glowing reviews. The rawness in particular proved difficult for me, though I'm not usually a squeamish reader. Large doses of overt sexual and racial tension mixed with the psychological devastation of sibling veterans overwhelmed me. The negative emotions it prompted made it difficult to continue reading.
I don't doubt the judgment of other readers and reviewers who have rated this book so favorably: rather, I believe I was one of the unfortunate minority who are not among its ideal audience. I was particularly disappointed that I wasn't enjoying it because one of the novel's basic premises - adopted children/multi-ethnic family - was so close to my reality. Readers must choose for themselves among the perspectives, but I feel that I would have to pretend to be a different reader to pen a positive review." - Stacey Rae Brownlie
Other Reviews
"Starred Review. Transcendent contemporary American literary fiction, a rich and passionate story rewarding enough to be read again." - Kirkus
"[A] powerful, stylish debut novel from New Orleans native and former Stegner fellow ... smartly plays off the thorough exploration of modern American attitudes on race, war, and family in this richly textured debut." - Publishers Weekly
"The magnificence of Hold It 'Til It Hurts is not only in the prose and the story but also in the book's great big beating heart. These complex and compelling characters and the wizardry of Johnson's storytelling will dazzle and move you from first page to last. Novels don't teach us how to live but Hold It 'Til It Hurts will make you hush and wonder." - Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead
"This rich and sophisticated first novel brings together pleasures rarely found in one book: Hold It 'Til It Hurts is a novel about war that goes in search of passionate love, a dreamy thriller, a sprawling mystery, a classical quest for a lost brother in which the shadowy quarry is clearly the seeker's own self, and a meditation on family and racial identity that makes its forerunners in American fiction look innocent by comparison." - Jaimy Gordon, National Book Award winner for Lord of Misrule
This information about Hold It 'til It Hurts was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
T. Geronimo Johnson was born in New Orleans. His fiction and poetry has appeared in Best New American Voices, Indiana Review, LA Review, and Illuminations, among others. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, Johnson currently teaches writing at University of California-Berkeley. Hold It 'Til It Hurts is his first book.
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