Word: punch
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...every so often a book comes along which has something dramatic to say, a book that is so moving and so alive that it makes us want to stand up and start shouting yes you're right, that's the way it is. William Sonzski's Punch Goes the Judy is that kind of book. I made it through the jacket hype, to find a novel that hit me like a punch to the solar plexus; a novel that made me laugh a lot and cry a little and most importantly, stop and think about just what it is that...
...Punch Goes the Judy tells a simple story. Punch is a nineteen-year-old Vassar sophomore from a traditionally conservative, wealthy, Indianapolis home. Through her own nature and will to live, her friends, and her environment, she has seen through the shit she has been spoon-fed all her life. She has seen through the hatred of men and sex her mother has tried to instill in her since childhood, through the robbery and racism of which her family's wealth is a product, and the maxim that you don't rock the boat, even if the boat is sinking...
Keves Bolton, her brother, is a graduate student in government at Columbia, who grew up, as he says, "a few years before the thought of changing the system from within became unthinkable." He is caught in the middle between Punch and her parents, sensitive to the horror that Punch has seen, yet still with the gut feeling that the way to solve problems is to be polite and diplomatic and bring everybody together again without rocking the boat...
Their story takes place as Punch and Keyes drive from New York toward their Indianapolis home. Punch wants desperately to run away, to escape the end of freedom she sees in going home. But Keyes is trying to take her home, "where we can work things out." "Work what out?" Punch asks, and he has nothing to say. As she gradually and fearfully unfolds to him the horror she knows and has felt so deeply, he too understands that there is no freedom in the life he has always lived, and "breaks through to the other side...
...arms. "Once I had a sick tiger," he recalls, "and crawled into his cage to push him over so the doctor could give him a shot of penicillin. He wasn't as sick as I thought. When I rolled him over, he bit my hand. I had to punch him in the nose to make him let go. I went to the hospital instead...