My grandmother taught me to read from a book we called “City Lights” though it appears to not be it’s actual title. This would have been between 1982-1987, but I am sure the book is older than that. It was a collection of short stories and poems for children. The book itself was an 8 by 12 hard cover, I believe the cover was a night time cityscape in shades of blue with a single bright yellow window in one of the buildings. I remember a poem that went: “Cat and I we had a fight, I hit, cat bit, we quit.” There was a story about a little boy who doesn’t want to get his haircut, and his hair gets so long it gets in his food, after dogs are attracted to the food in his hair and chase him he decides he does want to get his hair cut. The illustrations for that story are very similar to Susan Perl’s illustrations for the story Too Many Bozos.

The novel is fictional. I’m pretty sure it was written by a male. It’s roughly around 120-170 pages. It may have been released during the late 80-90s. From what I remember the background cover art was light blue and on the foreground, a face of a boy (pre-teens-young teenager) looking away to the left into the distance. There is also a bird (possibly a robin?) superimposed above him. The novel starts with a boy at a swim meet however I’m not sure if he wins or loses. After this, he is driving home with his mom and sister and they get into a fatal car accident (I’m not sure what becomes of the mother, but I do remember the sister having dialogue later in the book) which leaves the boy confined to a bed stuck in his thoughts for the most part. He is dealing with his changing body, his shifting views of sexuality and the death of his father during the Vietnam War (remembering scattered memories, the fact he doesn’t have father during all the puberty shift). I wish I could remember more but from what I do, it’s a fairly simple novel about a boy essentially dealing with existential burden from his growing body and lack of a fatherly figure.