I was bored senseless. Let's leave it at that.

Gene attended an exclusive New Hampshire school. 15 years later he came back to Devon School to seek forgiveness for what he did here while he was a student. In his school days he became friends with Finny, an outstanding athlete. Finny was a favorite of everyone. fellow students used to look up to him as their inspiration and teachers were mighty impressed with this boy for whatever he said prevailed. Gene was a spectacular student academically while Finny's dream was to attend Olympics of 1944...

[Edited for typos and pictures added 12/11/21]A short review because I can’t add much to the thousands of reviews that are out there. The story takes place at an elite all-boys New England prep school. (A thinly disguised Phillips Exter Academy in New Hampshire that the author attended.) The two main characters are opposites in many ways: an introverted, intellectual Southern boy and a Northerner who is outgoing, athletic, a risk-taker. The latter is a natural leader among the boys but he strugg...

The hero’s troubled memories of his schooldays… What happens when we revisit the past?So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all – plus c’est la même chose, plus ça change. Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence.Change is the nature of things. Changes are brought by time.We grow up and become different… The world around us keeps changing… Our memories pale and grow distorted… And eventually our adolescence turns into a faraway land.We try to r...

"And the rays of the sun were shooting past them, millions of rays shooting past them like--like golden machine-gun fire."Gene is a boy from the South attending an exclusive New Hampshire prep school. He becomes best friends with a New Englander from Boston named Phineas. Let me amend that, Phineas chooses Gene as his friend and any thoughts that Gene has of being friends with anyone else are quickly dispersed as he is pulled into the shimmering chimeric world creating and constantly maintained ...

uptight boy loves free spirit boy but is too uptight to admit it. fat-ass boy tries to get in the way. then, betrayal.

I remember viscerally hating this - I found it incredibly boring and I don't think anything really happened except a whole bunch of wank about being a moron and running and a paragraph lovingly describing a side character's butt. I don't even know.Furthermore, it was for eighth-grade English. My teacher gave us a quiz on some random detail-bits, and I remembered little things like how many years had passed between Point A and Point Boring, and that somehow meant that I wasn't actually UNDERSTAND...

I recently re-read this book for the AP class that I'm teaching and I was reminded of what a deceptively simple book this appears to be on the surface. Set in Devon (an all boys prep school) during WWII, A Separate Peace explores how the encroaching reality of war affects the psychological and social development of all the boys attending the school. The poignant irony of providing these young men with a classics based education at a prestigious school just to be sent into war to kill and be kill...

I remember this book distinctly because seldom have I hated a book more.
In addition to being a depressing piece of work, it is about as relevant to kids today as a 45RPM single (That's something we had before CDs, boys and girls Oh, and CDs were what we had before streaming). Why are they still putting it on reading lists? What fan of John Knowles has been paying teachers to force this on the kids?

This book had a profound and lasting impact of me. It is a short, exquisitely crafted story narrated by a talented but unconspicuous boy who is jealous of his best friend, Phineas--who is athletic, beautiful, and kind. Phineas stands tall as the prodigy of American prep adolescence. He is simple; he is likeable; he has panache; and he is virtuous. His greatest crime to the narrator, though, is his love. For though the narrator is jealous and resentful that of his authentic golden-boy friend, he ...