Seventeen (novel) - Reviews

Reviews

On the book's publication, the New York Times gave it a full-page review, calling it a "delicious lampoon" and praising it as "a notable study of the psychology of the boy in his latter teens."

Most reviewers have seen Seventeen as humorously truthful. A contemporary reviewer wrote, “Every man and woman over fifty ought to read Seventeen. It is not only a skillful analysis of adolescent love, it is, with all its side-splitting mirth, a tragedy. No mature person who reads this novel will ever seriously regret his lost youth or wish he were young again....” “As funny, but sadder than Penrod, it has the same insight into how it feels to be young.” In a review of the 1951 stage version, New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson called it a “humorous and touching story of adolescence…It has a touch of immortality that most popular works lack. Fundamentally it is true.”

Other reviewers fault the book for not being realistic. “Real adolescence, like any other age of man, has its own passions, its own poetry, its own tragedies and felicities; the adolescence of Mr. Tarkington's tales is almost nothing but farce staged for outsiders.”

Reviewers have suggested that Willie Baxter could be an older Penrod. Seventeen and Penrod are similar in structure; both are collections of sketches, and some characters and situations from Penrod are recycled in Seventeen: “any of the characters are parallel...There are whole episodes that are similar…”