The Chestnut Tree

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Laura Zanky

The year is 1966, the suburb is Beachmont in Westchester, and twelve-year-old Adam is simultaneously preparing for his Bar Mitzvah, nursing a crush on a Catholic girl named Sally, and stumbling toward the most consequential friendship of his young life. The Chestnut Tree is Mathew Tekulsky’s coming-of-age novel, and it has the particular quality of a story told by someone who remembers exactly what it felt like to be that age in that era: the weight of family expectation, the electricity of a first crush, the dawning awareness that the adult world is not as settled or as fair as it pretends to be.

The catalyzing figure is Gladys McKinley, a reclusive former children’s author who lives behind the chestnut tree of the title and carries the quiet damage of having been blacklisted. When Adam and Sally are drawn into her orbit, something shifts. Gladys becomes a mentor in the truest sense, not just to their writing ambitions but to their developing moral lives. Through her, they find themselves printing anti-war flyers, attending a Martin Luther King Jr. speech at Riverside Church, and beginning to understand that the courage required to write honestly is not so different from the courage required to act.

Tekulsky is especially good on the textures of late-1960s suburban life: the social fault lines between Catholic and Jewish families, the unexamined assumptions of a community that considers itself tolerant, the way children absorb the anxieties of history without anyone thinking to explain them. Adam’s father, a Holocaust survivor, casts a long shadow over the novel’s understanding of what political passivity costs.

At 154 pages, the book moves with the economy of a novella, each scene doing quiet double work. It is an earnest, carefully observed piece of historical fiction, most likely to resonate with readers who lived through that era or who want to understand how a generation first found its conscience.

About the Author

Mathew Tekulsky

Mathew Tekulsky is an award-winning and best-selling author, screenwriter, photographer, and nature writer whose work spans fiction, nonfiction, and film.

His novels include The Chestnut Tree; Saving Annie, a Feathered Quill Book Awards Gold Winner in Adult Fiction and an American Book Fest Best Book Awards finalist; and Bernie and the Hermit, a finalist in the William Faulkner–William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition.

Tekulsky has also published short stories in literary magazines and numerous nonfiction books on nature, photography, gardening, and Americana. A native of Larchmont, New York, he earned a B.A. in History with a minor in English from the University of Rochester.