Paul & Juliana

by Richard Hawley

Overview

In precisely the same spirit as Abelard and Heloise and Romeo and Juliet, Paul and Juliana are a fresh young couple who embody the near-impossible notion of perfect love. In this elegant, timeless, and lyrical love story, they walk the fine line between forbidden romance and tragic disaster that is the stuff of ageless myths.

Mr. Lawrence is a guidance counselor relegated to the mind-numbing task of proctoring standardized tests at his Chicago-area high school, then analyzing the results. Over-educated and over-cultured for his station, Lawrence is emotionally stifled, an island unto himself—until chance circumstance throws him into the lives of two high school students, Paul Berrisford and Juliana Franck.

Paul is a sloppy genius who would rather sing and play his guitar on a street corner than take the SATs and have his pick of Ivy League schools. Juliana is a lovely musical prodigy kept under the thumb of her old-fashioned, Viennese-born parents. Through Lawrence’s furtive but well-intentioned design, Paul and Juliana meet one another, then fall in love, almost at first glance.

Together, the two are a picture of courtly love brought to modern life. Lawrence’s guidance sessions with them begin to grow into a friendship between the three, and slowly, his own admiration and affection for the couple begins to develop into love. But is he in love with Paul, or with Juliana? Or is he in love with their love?

The situation takes an ill-fated turn when Juliana’s parents catch her in a clandestine, prohibited moment with Paul. The couple’s respective parents, concerned about each child’s welfare, forbid them to see one other. Lawrence, like the friar in Romeo and Juliet, is caught in the middle, struggling between emotion and professionalism. At the climax, Paul and Juliana come to a fork in the road, one route that could kill their love—and another that could kill them.

Author Richard Hawley revives the classical romance in order to ask age-old questions: Is true adolescent love possible? What is perfect love? And what is perfection? Paul and Juliana leaves the answers up to you, while promising to take you on a magical journey of both personal and epic proportions.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940014063685
Publisher:	Bancroft Press
Publication date:	11/01/2003
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	188
File size:	243 KB

About the Author

Richard A. (Rick) Hawley began teaching at University School (US) in the Cleveland, Ohio area in 1968. Educated at Middlebury College, Cambridge University, and Case Western Reserve University, where he completed a Ph.D. in political philosophy, he went on to chair US's social science department, to direct the guidance program as dean of students, and to serve as director of the Upper School before being named headmaster in 1988. He has taught courses in history, government, economics, and philosophy, coached baseball, tennis, and basketball, and served as advisor to the student newspaper and literary magazine.

Dr. Hawley has a national reputation both as educator and as author. With consistent freshness and enthusiasm, he has lectured and spoken extensively on child development and topical social issues. He is one of the founders and past president of Boys' Schools, an international association of schools and individuals dedicated to the education of boys in schools designed specifically for them.

He has written more than a dozen works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, including the novel The Headmaster's Papers, which won several literary prizes, including a Bread Loaf Writers Conference Fellowship for First Fiction, and remains standard fare in the private school world. His non-fiction works include The Purposes of Pleasure, Seeing Things, The Big Issues in the Adolescent Journey, and Boys Will Be Men. His published poetry collections include With Love to My Survivors and St. Julian. His most recent book prior to Paul & Juliana, The Headmaster's Wife, was published in 2000. He taught fiction and non-fiction writing at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf Writers Conference for ten years. He also reviews books for The Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Dr. Hawley lives with his wife and three daughters in Hunting Valley, Ohio. He can be reached via email at .

Editorial Reviews

Richard Hawley is a gifted writer, with an eye for the unlikely detail, an ear for the unexpected phrase. He sees the world around him vividly, and does so especially in Paul & Juliana, an affecting novel about the difficulties of love and the complications wrought by social norms that oppress rather than liberate those caught in their rigidities. This seems very much Hawley's own sort of book: adroit, learned, lapidary, and sharply etched.

Jay Parini, Author of the bestseller The Last Station and Director of the Middlebury College Creative Writing Pr

Paul & Juliana knocks me out. So many things about it seem so right, especially its tone, which never condescends to "Writing for the Young Adult Audience" or "Writing for the Clinical Audience" or "Writing for the Kid Audience." I know there are Pauls and Julianas in our schools, and they are terribly at risk in a number of ways, including not finding others to honor the depth of their feelings for each other.

David Mallery, Director of Professional Development, National Association of Independent Schools

The novel Paul & Juliana is a radiant—and unnervingly clever— telling of the most powerful love story in the Western record. By choosing Lawrence as his narrator, himself a man out of his own time, Hawley injects an ethical dilemma of adult culpability into this story of adolescent love, which is arguably, and in this novel so obviously, the truest love we can know. Paul & Juliana is a powerful and elegant story, in both the reiteration of the myth and in its own right.

Mike Ruhlman, Author of Five Highly Praised Works of Literary Nonfiction including Boys Themselves, Soul of a Chef

This novel easily held my attention . . . Parallels with Romeo and Juliet are intriguing and the characters are (mostly) likeable in this fun book. 3Q 4P

Annie Sageng

A veritable matreshka doll of a fiction: a small volume that yields up, on closer examination, layers multifold. Beneath the surface of the quintessential Elizabethan love story reconfigured, Hawley has contrived a Jamesean novel of freighted cerebration, stated in flawless Victorian diction; he has equipped his characters with concerns and sensibilities worthy of the Belle Epoch, and he has transplanted Shakespeare's precocious lovers from 16th-century Verona to a postmodern-day high school.

Ron Powers, Pulitzer Prize-winning Journalist, Author, TV Commentator