"...we sat smoking in silence."

Wil Just brings the spirit and flavor of Eisenhower era Chicago to readers in an alert, yet nuanced manner.

An Unfinished Season delivers many contrasting family intrigues, from Wils and his father to Aurora and her father.

The evocative ice hockey on the pond sets up a love/hate for Wils father as he refuses to compromise
with the labor union picketing his print shop, then caves into his wife's odd demands.

"He was attractive to women
because it looked as if he could handle himself and anyone else, and because he seemed to withhold so much."
This could also describe Aurora's father.

Both fathers are more compelling than Wils with his debutante parties and so the endings falter,
yet the book is definitely worth keeping to read again. Wils finally excels in his reaction to lying newsmen. ( )

Wils Raven is a young man from an unhappy family living in the exurbs of Chicago in 1953. His father's business (and reputation) is floundering as the result of a nasty labor strike at his printing business and his mother is alienated by a distant husband and the terminal illness of her father. What lies ahead during the summer in-between graduating from high school and his Freshman year at the University of Chicago is an exotic (to him) job as a gofer at a third-rate tabloid newspaper and a dizzying round of debutante parties in the north shore Chicago suburbs.

At one of these parties he meets Aurora Brule, the daughter of a prominent psychiatrist, but also the product of a dysfunctional family. Of course they are destined to come together. However, when tragedy strikes, Wils must grow up quickly, and he finds that life hardly ever turns out to be like one dreams it will be.

Ward Just gets the period atmosphere just right & tells this coming of age story with perception and grace. ( )

This is a very well-written story of a privileged young man's summer between high school and college. It is set in 1950s Chicago and vividly portrays its characters.
The tone is similar to that of Fitzgerald but the writing, although descriptive and engrossing, is not quite as clear. The author even mentions Gatsby.
When I read this book and initially wrote this review, I believed that I had never read his books before. I was mistaken; I had read Echo House. An Unfinished Season is much better than that novel. ( )

Read on Kindle (sale book). Spoilers (if I remember). This is well written, no question. And I guess the young man is supposed to be naive & inexperienced & not know what he doesn't know...but he wasn't very appealing. I guess there is not supposed to be a "bad guy", just tragedy. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to think about the girl's father with the instant diagnoses, it seemed nutty in a different way from the rest of his story.

An Unfinished Season is Ward Just's coming of age story set in Chicago of the 1950s. The year before Wils goes off to college is the year his father sees his control of his business challenged as his workers strike. His mother is frightened and his father begins carrying a gun in a duffel he carries everywhere with him. Wils gets a summer job at a local Chicago paper and spends his time juggling two worlds; the gritty, hyped up atmosphere of the newsroom and the genteel debutante parties he attends several times a week. He's not sure what he wants to do with his life, but he knows he doesn't want to follow along the well worn paths set for the well-heeled sons of the affluent families of the North Shore.

More than the story itself, the center of this book is the city of Chicago and the atmosphere of the 1950s. Just writes beautifully, and here he puts his skills to work describing the politics and manners of a world just beginning to change. Wils is less important than he thinks he is, but what nineteen-year-old is, and its through his eyes we get a snapshot of the world at a very specific time and place. Just is an underappreciated writer of great skill and heart and I'm always happy to read one of his books. ( )