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Mia sucks her thumb. It comforts her when she is sad, calms her when she is excited, and gives her courage when she needs to be brave. Mommy tells her she is too old for it, Daddy warns that her teeth will get crooked, her brother tells her she's embarrassing, and Grandpa offers her money to stop; but Mia refuses to quit. But when Grandma says,'I'll try it!'it's too much even for Mia who says,'Stop it! It's really embarrassing!'Young readers will laugh at this offbeat picture book, and exasperated adults will be pleased to find a book that addresses this common childhood compulsion with humor and compassion.

This eighties-centric, Ritalin-fueled, pitch-perfect comic novel by a writer to watch brings energy and originality to the classic Midwestern coming-of-age story.Meet Justin Cobb,'the King Kong of oral obsessives'(as his dentist dubs him) and the most appealingly bright and screwed-up fictional adolescent since Holden Caulfield donned his hunter's cap. For years, no remedy--not orthodontia, not the escalating threats of his father, Mike, a washed-out linebacker turned sporting goods entrepreneur, not the noxious cayenne pepper-based Suk-No-Mor--can cure Justin's thumbsucking habit.Then a course of hypnosis seemingly does the trick, but true to the conservation of neurotic energy, the problem doesn't so much disappear as relocate. Sex, substance abuse, speech team, fly-fishing, honest work, even Mormonism--Justin throws himself into each pursuit with a hyperactive energy that even his daily Ritalin dose does little to blunt.Each time, however, he discovers that there is no escaping the unruly imperatives of his self and the confines of his deeply eccentric family. The only'cure'for the adolescent condition is time and distance.Always funny, sometimes hilariously so, occasionally poignant, and even disturbing, deeply wise on the vexed subject of fathers and sons, Walter Kirn's Thumbsucker is an utterly fresh and all-American take on the painful process of growing up.