Do-Over!

March 30, 2009
When Hemley, a writing professor at the University of Iowa, decides that he wants to do over some of the experiences he flubbed as a child, he isn't just dreaming. The 48-year-old father of three makes a list of times and places he'd like to revisit, including kindergarten, the prom and summer camp, doggedly pursuing all the contacts and background checks necessary to “storm the walls of childhood” as an adult. Surprisingly, the kids and teachers he meets along the way accept him in his overgrown state; some even express envy. The complex logistics of Hemley's quest—including endless e-mails and phone calls to convince others that he's legit—can be tedious, but Hemley is endearing, funny and more than a bit courageous (the night before his first day of kindergarten, he's too nervous to sleep.) As he tackles his part in the school play or sits with the popular kids at lunch, Hemley philosophically ponders the lessons of the past. While some experiences don't pan out quite the way he hopes (after crashing his car into the ACT center, he ditches the idea of a standardized test repeat), others fall serendipitously into place (a crush from high school now works as the school's alumni director and agrees to be his prom date). A big kid at heart, the author draws readers in with just the right mix of humor and tenderness. 22 b&w photos.

April 1, 2009
A 48-year-old writer chronicles his goofball quest to correct the perceived failures of his youth.

Hemley (Nonfiction Writing/Univ. of Iowa; Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday, 2003, etc.) undertakes a dubious immersion-journalism project in the form of"do-overs." These attempts to repair the major emotional traumas of his childhood and adolescence involve revisiting the sites of his worst failures, from kindergarten to high school, summer camp to standardized testing. He couldn't even scrounge up a prom date. But you'd think his privileged adult existence—published author, father of three, university professor—might snuff out memories of botched grade-school plays and junior-high bullies. Hemley, however, insists that he's still bothered by these trivialities. Too bad, then, that the book's conceptual gimmickry yields little more than the occasional entertaining anecdote, the obvious fish-out-of-water comedy inherent in someone pushing 50 trying to pass for a five-year-old, and a fitfully amusing travelogue, as the author lumbers from Sewanee, Tenn., to Osaka, Japan, trying to enlist unfortunate souls from his past in his geeky time-travel fantasies. Of course, Hemley's had real traumas that hang like a mist over this revisionist endeavor: an ugly divorce, his late sister Nola's schizophrenia and his father's death at 51. A few relevant observations cut through the"gee, they sure did things differently in my day!" remarks, as when Hemley contrasts contemporary kids' structured, monitored and medicated lives with the dog-eat-dog anarchism that characterized his own youthful social experiences. But the do-over with the most potential for dramatic tension—going to the senior prom with his high-school crush—falls flat.

Far from generating epiphanies, these"renovations" merely reinforce how nice it is to be an adult.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

April 1, 2009
Regrets? Sure, he has a few. Ten to be precise. Beginning with a shrewish kindergarten teacher who made his first academic year pure torture and ending with his mortifying withdrawal from a foreign-exchange program his senior year in high school, Hemley revisits the lowest episodes of his formative years in order to gain perspective on what went wrong the first time around. Inventively, Hemley actually reenacts thedo-over experience in pursuit of authenticity, adopting the persona of a sixth-grader to see if this timehe can avoid being the bullies favorite target, and finally nailhis lines from The Littlest Angel, a performance complete with a super-sized costume. Now a middle-aged husband and father andsuccessfulauthor and professor, Hemley knows he should haveleft these youthful traumas behind, but unavoidable shame and unsettled scores die hard. Taking the concept of coulda, woulda, shoulda to its most eccentric extreme, Hemleys step back in time imparts hard-earned wisdom with humility and humor.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)