The Crowded Room: A Novella by Jeffrey Dunne
by Michael Maupin
Category: High school seniors

This coming-of-age novella tracks a week in the life of high-school senior Jeffrey Dunne who's smack in the middle of Homecoming 1978. His classwork is suffering, his friends are alienating him (and vice versa), and to top it all, his cheerleader girlfriend has just ditched him for another guy. Teachers are always saying that you're here to learn something and all I learned is how to get sick and go crazy. That's all. I get really sick when I see everybody getting everything they want, anytime . . . Put them together with the brainy idiots still raising their hands and asking stupid questions and you get a yearbook with all of them there in the hall of fame, pretty as a picture and smiling and not giving a damn. Anyone who has ev er lived with a teenager, or remembers what it was like to be a teenager, will appreciate Jeffrey Dunne? Twin Cities writer and critic Michael Fallon, from the foreword, Maupin evokes the teenage wasteland of a 1970s Minnesota high school.