AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • Two teenagers, in love and insane, journey across the United States in this Bonnie and Clyde–like adventure, pursuing a warped American dream, where Elvis is still king and the corn dog is the “backbone of this great country.”
“There is a typo on page 14. Other than that, this book is perfect.” —Bill Callahan“He told her he was a one-woman man and she was it for him. Teal said that was good because he was it for her. It and It. Both of them were It.” Kody Rawlee Green is stuck in juvie. Tella “Teal Cartwheels” Carticelli is packing her bags for Rome--on the orders of her parents, who want her as far from Kody as possible. But teenage love is too strong a force for the obstacles of reality. And the highway beckons.
Leaving their abusive pasts behind them in Jersey, Kody and Teal set off on a cross-country road trip equal parts self-destruction and self-discovery, making their way, one stolen car at a time, toward bigger, wider, bluer skies. Along the road, of course, there’s time to stop at Graceland, classic diners, a fairgrounds that smells of “pony shit and kettle corn," and time for run-ins with outsize personalities like the reincarnated Grand Canyon tour guide Dead Bob and the spurious Montana rancher Bill Gold. On their heels, all the while, is Teal’s brother, Neil Carticelli, who’s abandoned his post in the navy to rescue the sister he left behind. But does she really need saving?
These all too American tropes find new expression in Bud Smith’s own freewheeling prose—and in Rae Buleri’s original illustrations—filling
Teenager with humor, poetry, and a joy that’s palpable in every unforgettable sentence.
A VINTAGE ORIGINAL
"A Vintage Books original"--Title page verso.
LIT HUB'S MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF THE YEAR
“There is a typo on page 14. Other than that, this book is perfect.”
—Bill Callahan"Teenager won't make you want to be young again, but you may be shocked at what it awakens in you, the feelings and memories of long-buried past selves. Bud Smith asks us to not only remember those past selves, but to handle them gently. A rare novel that manages to be both sharp-edged and deeply romantic, classic yet wholly fresh."
—Jean Kyoung Frazier, author of Pizza Girl“
Teenager is a great artistic high-wire act and a gift to readers who still care about the timeless problem of young men and women finding their place together in this world—or not. Should Tella get in another stolen car with Kody and flee with him to the Montana of his imagination? Both quests are represented here, hers and his, Yin and Yang, and Smith tells it all with ecstatic wit and feeling and innocence. To have captured this duality on paper demanded more than wildness, more than heart—all of which Smith has to burn—but also will and skill and ingenuity.”
—Atticus Lish,
author of The War for Gloria“From the Graceland mansion to an alpaca farm in Montana, from a chapel in the Grand Canyon to the ancient forests of California, this is a love story as epic and eccentric as America. In prose that crackles and sings off the page, Bud Smith has written a humorous and tender new classic.”
—Mary South, author of You Will Never Be Forgotten“Abused when not neglected, and with no patience for self-pity,
Teenager’s Kody and Teal are the latest memorable additions to that venerable American tradition of
They’re young, they’re in love, and they’ll shoot if they have to, lighting out for the west and freedom. Wildly romantic, blithely clueless and always headlong, they’re above all else passionately appreciative of the miracle of someone else having chosen, of all things, them, and everywhere they go they reveal, in all its doofy and intermittent heartlessness and lethality, the America that spawned them.” —
Jim Shepard, author of Phase Six
“Bud Smith is a classic writer who taps into the absurd skillfully. His dry, deft, enthusiastic language guts without being sentimental.
Teenager is a study on the gnawing, American desire for escape; the lengths we will go to elude boredom, find love, and feel connected. From Tennessee to Montana, I’ll follow Kody and Teal wherever they take me.”
—Halle Hill, author of Good Women
"Written in sentences as spare and fine as line drawings,
Teenager is a blood-soaked love story that is at once hopeless and hopeful, reckless yet redeeming. A ton of fun.”
—Lee Clay Johnson, author of Nitro Mountain
"We could use more writers like Bud Smith.
Teenager is a lovestruck, cross-country road-trip novel following a couple of ill-starred delinquents on the run from the olds; and though we have plenty of novels that tell
that story, this is the only one we have from Bud Smith. And that’s good." —
Jonny Diamond, Literary Hub 
