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Title: Killing Time in St. Cloud by Judith Guest, Rebecca Hill ISBN: 0-440-50069-9 Publisher: Delacorte Press Pub. Date: 01 October, 1988 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)

Rating: 4
Summary: Peyton Place, MN
Comment: The prologue of this book takes place in St. Cloud, MN on Prom night, 1976. Then the authors fast forward to the Christmas Season, 1988 and slowly, in multi-layered character exposition "like time through an hour glass," tell the reader what everyone has been up to in the intervening years.

Like Stephen King's Carrie, it observes high school foibles: "You've been away too long, Charlie. I'll tell you something. There is no life after high school. Not in this town. The grown up world is just high school with money." That statement rings true. Those who remain in town appear to be locked in a sort of "time warp." They maintain the harsh high school cliqued pecking order in which they were, and are, mired and "pigeon hole" returnees in their long-ago station.

I found myself wondering if I had been mistaken about the genre as I was reading the first part of the book. The dead body at the center of the who-dun-it murder mystery doesn't even appear until page 167 of this 300 page work. So, for the first half of the book, the story is soap operatic a la "As St. Cloud Turns" - but that could be anticipated in a book co-authored by Judith Guest, who also penned "Ordinary People." The unsympathetic mother character played by Mary Tyler Moore in the Robert Redford movie of that book has aged a bit and now appears as a mother/grandmother in St. Cloud.

Remember old-fashioned roller coasters? When the ride starts and your car is slowly being hauled up the first incline from whence centrifugal force and gravity take over? That's what the first part of this book feels like. Once "up top" it's time to "Hang on folks, we're in for a bumpy ride." When this book gets going, it is intriguing.