Publishers Weekly
starred review
Set in the English countryside in the aftermath of WWII, this quietly compelling sixth novel from Cameron (The Weekend) focuses on the story of the eponymous heroine, Coral, a nurse, sent to Hart House in 1950 to tend the dying Mrs. Hart. With great efficiency, Cameron introduces the other players: Mrs. Hart’s son, Maj. Clement Hart, an embittered veteran wounded in the war; his friend Robin Lofting; the brittle, disapproving housekeeper, Mrs. Prense. But after Mrs. Hart dies, and Major Hart proposes to Coral, this seemingly well-realized homage to the postwar British novel quickly turns almost gothic...The book is suffused with a lonely sadness and an aura of the surreal, and the many dramatic events in Coral’s life are entirely plausible thanks to Cameron’s skill as a storyteller.
Library Journal
Despite its Rebecca-like beginning—a Mrs. Danvers stand-in, a murder mystery, and a withholding husband—the first love in this story is not the major's first wife. As the reasons for his repressed emotions unfold, we see how they have led to many of the misunderstandings and plot twists that follow. With its atmospheric Fifties setting and stylish writing, this is one of Cameron's finest novels. —Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.
Booklist
Cameron’s shimmering and expectant prose infuses this deceptively simple novel with an incandescent depth. When a spiritually bereft Coral Glynn arrives at Hart House in the gloomy north of England in 1950 to nurse the elderly Mrs. Hart, her ever-precarious situation as a servant/guest in the household is threatened by the unexpectedly quick death of her patient. Still, Coral is presented with the chance of a more comfortable life when Clement, the physically and emotionally damaged son of Mrs. Hart, proposes marriage. When Coral stumbles upon two children playing a gruesome and dangerous game in the primeval forest adjacent to Hart House, it confirms her initial misgivings. The decidedly somber and gothic tone of the narrative rings the perfect warning note as the reader begins to suspect that a standard fairy-tale ending is highly unlikely for a cast of lost souls forlornly muted by unrequited longings. — Margaret Flanagan
You Must Read This
...I was hooked. So hooked, that since then, I've actually bought copies and given them away to total strangers — it's a rather embarrassing practice, but that is how much I want to create a word-of-mouth movement that would rouse the world into recognizing the book's sheer excellence.
Jennifer Hubbard recommends
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You on NPR's website. To read her entire piece, please click
here.
Lorrie Moore reviews
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
in The New York Review of Books
"Deliciously vital right from the start...
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is a piece of vocal virtuosity and possibly Cameron's best book: it retains the lucid and unlabored prose of his previous ones but wastes less time; it may be his most successful novel on its own terms -- terms that are not as modest as they may initially seem...What Peter Cameron has done is written a sophisticated and adult book. Neither young adult literature, nor even really a coming-of-age story,
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is most surprisingly of all the subtlest September 11 novel yet written. So accomplished is its subtlety that one is not even aware of this novel's true subject until three quarters of the way through, and then its mention...rises up out of the story's barely submerged anxiety and casts on the book a sudden, brilliant light.
It is a bravura performance, and Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is a stunning little book."
To read the entire review, please click
here.
New Editions of
The City of Your Final Destination,
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, The Weekend, & Andorra
published by Picador
Picador published a new paperback version of
The Weekend, Cameron's second novel, in April 2009.
The Weekend was first published in 1994 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and a year later in paperback by Plume, but has been out of print for several years. In May 2009 Picador also released paperback editions of Cameron's third novel,
Andorra, and fifth novel,
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You.
In April 2010, Picador published a new edition of
The City of Your Final Destination, to coincide with the release of the Merchant Ivory film based upon the book.
See sidebar for images of all the new Picador editions.
* * *
Gayle Forman picks
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
on the Daily Beast's Buzz Board
"Several weeks after finishing it, I am still thinking about the book’s erudite, confused hero, James, who’s grappling with his future, his sexuality, his screwed-up family, and his 9/11-scarred hometown. Cameron, a critically acclaimed adult author, won heaps of raves for this coming-of-age tale and I’m sure it sold fine, but somehow that doesn’t seem quite enough. I can’t get why everyone hasn’t read this book. Though it’s become a cliché to say so, Someday… deserves to join the pantheon of teen misfit-lit classics—right up there with Holden. With a paperback version coming out in April, there’s time to remedy that. Forget the YA label; it’s a book for the ages."
Evan Hughes reviews
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
in the Barnes & Noble Review
In Peter Cameron's new novel, his eighth work of fiction, the narrator is a disaffected teenage product of divorced, self-involved, and privileged parents. He is thus so emblematic of a typical upper-middle-class experience today that there is from the outset the potential for cliché, suggesting that Cameron has set himself an admirably difficult task. James Sveck, a Manhattanite, smacks of an updated Holden Caulfield, believing as he does that nearly everyone is a fraud, apart from a young man who runs his mother's art gallery and, touchingly, his grandmother. But Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You -- a work unfairly categorized as "young adult" -- is a keenly observed and elegantly drawn novel that skirts the problems typical of the post-Salinger teenage angst story.
To read the entire review, please click
here.
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
in The New York Times Book Review
"His best work — it’s terrific, piercing and funny. The novel demonstrates every kind of strength...He will make a large portion of his audience, especially those who look for relief in books, feel excitingly understood. And he has a rarer ability: he will make many of them itch to write."
To read the complete review, click
here
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
in The Boston Globe
The book both fits within and smashes any number of literary molds: coming-of-age novel, New York novel, 9/11 novel. From the first sentence, you'll be snagged by its precocious, funny-sad narrator and his you'd-pay-to-hear-him-read-the-phone-book voice."
Michael Lowenthal is the author of
Charity Girl, which is now available in paperback.
click
here for link
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
in Newsday
"Peter Cameron's novels and story collections - such as The Weekend andThe City of Your Final Destination - are kept on the fiction shelves of your local library or bookstore, but you'll most likely find his new novel, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, in the young adult section. Cameron didn't set out to write a young adult novel, but his publisher is cross-marketing the book to teenagers because its narrator is a troubled 18-year-old boy. Was this a good idea? Grown-ups may be resistant to the idea of reading a young adult book. Teenagers, on the other hand, might not be able to single the book out from a genre stuffed with badly written "issue" fiction. Either way, it will be a shame if Cameron's book doesn't find a following on both sides of the age divide. It's the kind of novel that could be a great solace to an 18-year-old...His highly cultured, dryly funny voice, which seduces the reader from the first page on, makes Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You appealing to adult readers as well."
James Sveck likes his grandmother and the late introverted British author Denton Welch. That's about it. He has no friends, his family doesn't get him, and he can't quite wrap his mind around his awkward attraction to John, an older gay colleague at his mother's dull Manhattan art gallery. He is antisocial, cynical, prone to anxiety attacks and a little bit depressed -- and his narration of life is quite droll and affecting... James Sveck is a brilliant wit of a character whose voice will echo long after his story ends."
"For the life of me, I cannot figure out why Peter Cameron’s astonishing novel is being sold as a Young Adult novel. Granted, the charmingly neurotic and endearing, proto-gay, boy-genius, first-person narrator, James Sveck, is 18 and muddling through a long hot summer before he’s supposed to matriculate at Brown (and, of course, he doesn’t want to go), which is to say a ripe angsty hero for YA readers; and granted, as YA fiction (where lately so much innovative and risky literature is being published), the book will open up city living, the gallery world, online dating, existential geekdom and the conundrum of sexual identity for its target audience in fresh new ways. But my fear is that Adult Adult readers will overlook what is possibly one of the all-time great New York books, not to mention an archly comic gem (that’s LOL to the YA set). Sveck leapfrogs Holden Caufield into the 21st century, and it’s about time Peter Cameron, the urbane, astutely observant author of Andorra, The City of Your Final Destination and The Weekend gained the wider audience he richly deserves. So I take back what I said: With young folk facebooking each other about STPWBUTY, maybe they’ll end up igniting a Cameron craze."
Julia Alvarez Recommends
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
from
Critical Mass (the blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors):
"Billed as a young adult book, Peter Cameron's SOMEDAY THIS PAIN WILL BE USEFUL TO YOU is a wonderful little gem of a book--funny, smart, and totally engaging. A sort of 21st century CATCHER IN THE RYE. I only picked it up because I'm working on a Y.A. title and so I look for books in the same category that might serve as an inspiration and a challenge. This one is certainly both! Hopefully, its "label" (of Y.A.) won't keep it only in the hands of librarians and teens. It deserves a wider readership."
Julia Alvarez was a National Book Critics Circle award finalist for
In the Time of the Butterflies. Her latest books include
Saving the World and
Once Upon a Quinceanera.
Publishers Weekly
Kirkus Reviews
Amazon.com
Horn Books
all select
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
as one of the
BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
"With its off-balance marriage of the hilarious and the tragic, Cameron's YA debut holds readers in the grip of its narrator, a desperately alienated, hyper-articulate 18-year-old Manhattanite." -- Publishers Weekly
“'I only feel like myself when I am alone,' says James, and Cameron draws his heartbreaking isolation with empathy and acuteness. The book’s first-person depiction of a privileged but disaffected young protagonist at sea in affluent Manhattan makes it seem very much an “old school” YA novel, but it has an unmistakably contemporary sensibility and respect for teen readers." -- Horn Book Fanfare
Deirdre Baker reviews
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
in The Toronto Star
"The promo bumph for Peter Cameron's
Someday this Pain Will be Useful to You is all about how it's like J.D. Salinger's
Catcher in the Rye. Not altogether, in fact. Although
Someday might draw a smaller, more demanding audience than Salinger's novel, it's considerably more sophisticated, subtle and rewarding... This is an outstanding novel."
To read the complete review, click
here.
