A Day at the Fair with Chili Boy

About the Book

We all probably agree that good behavior is commendable, but often boring.  In the summer of 1958 Miss Grace Holly moved to Montgomery, Alabama from her family’s home in Selma to search for a bit of excitement to spice up her rather well-behaved existence, and she found out just how seductive the dark side of life can be.

After taking a job as a cashier at the local Woolworth’s, she sees a pickpocket rob a customer right in the store.  When she later meets the young man who perpetrated the crime--Wendell Bryant Tuckerman, a.k.a. Chili Boy-–she finds herself pushed into situation after situation where her most cherished notions about herself and the world around her are continually called into question.  Although her inherent good sense and tenacity keep her out of even worse trouble, memories of her brief time with Chili Boy have haunted and molded her to this very day; she cannot escape him, even though he has been out of her life for over forty years.

Writing down her memories of what happened that summer has now become important to her, and she does so with wit, sadness, hard-won self-awareness, and just a little bit of what she might call “bird twittering” to ease the passage of the more painful recollections.  Throughout it all, we grow to understand more about Grace, more about the influence that a single individual can have on our lives, and more about the difficulty of making the right decisions in a world where the right decisions sometimes end up hurting just a little too much.

Whether you’re sixteen or sixty, every reader can recognize a bit of both Grace and Chili Boy in themselves, and the story of how Grace deals with what she calls “her final bright summer of innocence” is bittersweet, funny, and thoroughly human in all its dimensions.  None of us win every battle, but what makes us who we are is the manner in which we go forward and deal with what life has to offer.  Grace show herself to be a battler throughout, and she will not be denied as she tries to sort out the complexities that led up to her “day at the fair with Chili Boy.”

About the Author

Andrew Wilk grew up on Long Island, and he later received his B.A from Yale and M.A. from The University of Connecticut. He is married and works as a high school English teacher in East Central Illinois.