Excerpt from The View from Mount Joy by Lorna Landvik, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Things never got back to the way they had been, but eventually my mom stopped crying all the time, I stopped thinking I was going to explode, and a new normalcy crept into the house I’d grown up in. And now she was willing to throw away that normalcy we’d worked so hard to cobble together.

“Just tell her you’re not going!” said Steve Alquist at the kegger that was my going-away party.

“Yeah, you could stay at my house,” said Gary Conroy, who’d played D with me since we were pee wees. “She can’t break up the team like that!”

“You could come to my house for supper,” said Jamie Jensen, my might- be girlfriend. (“Might-be” because she’d just broken up with Dan Powers and we’d been hovering around each other, waiting for someone to make a move.) “I’ve got to cook two dinners a week for my 4-H project . . . and my lasagna’s pretty good.”

“I’ll bet it is,” I said, and because I was a little drunk, I reacted to the internal voice that hollered, It’s now or never, stupid! by leaning over and kissing her. That she kissed me back almost made me feel worse than I already did.

But as bummed out as I was about leaving Granite Creek, I couldn’t not go. It was a close call, but I figured in the scheme of things, my mother needed me to go with her more than I needed to stay.

“You owe me big-time,” I said as we loaded up the rental truck a week after school got out.

“I know I do, Joe. And I’ll figure out a way to make it up to you; I promise I will.”

“You don’t have to make anything up to me,” I said, the gruffness in my voice a fence holding back my emotions.

She sniffed. “I love you, Joey.”

It seems there’s been a shift in the family hierarchy; nowadays parents do everything for their kids. If junior’s an athlete, his parents enroll him in expensive clinics and traveling teams and easily transfer him to a different school to give him a better playing opportunity. Hell, when we played, lots of parents didn’t even come to regular games, saving their appearances for tournaments or playoffs. Not that we minded—our parents weren’t on us the way parents are on kids now. But conversely, it was understood that in the family’s decision making, the adults were the captains and the kids were second string, if they were even allowed on the team.

But all I knew as we drove through our shady neighborhood was: My life as I know it is ending!

My mother must have picked up my telepathically transmitted howl, because when she spoke again, her voice was bright and cheery. It was that sort of bright and cheery that reeks of fakeness, but when it came to my mom, I’d take fakeness over tears any day.

“You’ll see, Joey—it’s going to be great living in a city! It’ll be one adventure after another!”

“Sure it will, Ma,” I said, and just as we turned off Main Street toward the freeway, I looked at the marquis of the Paramount movie theater. Play Misty for Me was showing, and I could imagine the crowd— my crowd—that would see it that night; could imagine the insults they’d yell at the screen if the dialogue was lame; could imagine the perturbed “shh!” they’d get from other patrons as they passed Hot Tamales and jujubes down the row, rattling the boxes like maracas; could imagine how I might kiss Jamie Jensen and how she would taste like buttered popcorn.

It wasn’t until we were on the freeway, heading south, that I realized how much my jaw hurt, how I was clenching my teeth so hard that I thought they might crumble in their sockets. How could “one adventure after another” even compare to Play Misty for Me showing at the Paramount?

My aunt Beth lived in a house by Lake Nokomis, and my bedroom had a window the morning sun blared into, slapping me in the face and shouting, Wake up!

Excerpted from The View from Mount Joy by Lorna Landvik Copyright © 2007 by Lorna Landvik. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.