BOOK TOUR SPOTLIGHT & GIVEAWAY: The Seven Torments of Amy & Craig by Don Zolidis

Posted by Carrie

The Seven Torments of Amy and Craig

by Don Zolidis

YA Contemporary

Book Description

Janesville, Wisconsin (cold in the sense that there is no God)
1994

The worst thing that’s ever happened to Craig is also the best: Amy. Amy and Craig never should’ve gotten together. Craig is an awkward, Dungeons & Dragons-playing geek, and Amy is the beautiful, fiercely intelligent student-body president of their high school.

Yet somehow they did. Until Amy dumped him. Then got back together with him. Then dumped him again. Then got back together with him again. Over and over and over.

Unfolding during their senior year, Amy and Craig’s exhilarating, tumultuous relationship is a kaleidoscope of joy, pain, and laughter as an uncertain future-and adult responsibility-loom on the horizon.

Craig fights for his dream of escaping Janesville and finding his place at a quirky college, while Amy’s quest to uncover her true self sometimes involves being Craig’s girlfriend and sometimes doesn’t.

Seven heartbreaks. Seven joys.Told nonsequentially, acclaimed playwright Don Zolidis’s debut novel is a brutally funny, bittersweet taste of the utterly unique and utterly universal experience of first love.

She laughed again. “You know what I’m saying?”

“Sure,” I said, realizing I had zoned out again and she had probably said something important. “It’s just like . . . ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ By T. S. Eliot.”

“Well, yes, but I think that’s more about alienation than anything else, and what I’m talking about is acceptance. Like,

Prufrock can’t accept that he’s changed and the world is becoming different, you know?”

“Yup,” I said, crossing it off in my notebook. Shit.

You’re probably beginning to understand why I wrote down things to talk about.

“I think my favorite line,” I said, looking down at the rest of my notes, “is ‘I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.’”

“Aww,” she said. “Why?

I smiled into my pillow. I hoped she could see it too. “Because that’s how I used to feel before I met you.”

“I’m singing to you,” Amy said into the phone. “Except I really suck at singing.”

“I think the singing is metaphorical.”

“Maybe they’re like the Sirens. Luring lonely poets to their doom. And really they’ve got teeth like knives and will rip you to shreds if you come too close.”

“That pretty accurately describes my love life up to this point.”

“I’m sure it’s not that bad.”

“It’s pretty bad.”

“Oh come on.”

Amy was my first girlfriend. Well, okay, there was Jessica Southern, my junior year, who I went out with for nine days. We kissed once, and then she decided that the whole thing was a misunderstanding. Which it probably was. So, twelve days into my first relationship with Amy, we had already lasted exactly 33 percent more than my previous record (yes, I had done the math).