When private school English teacher John Gausman learns that his former student, James Brooke, had been killed in the recent Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, he decides with support of his school Adirondack Grove School near Miami to delve deeper into Brooke's life. Reviewing his incomplete diary, interactions and interviews with former classmates, discussions with friends and faculty, and recollections of his own experiences with James as his student at the boarding school, Professor Gausman prepares the diary for publication. From his research, Gausman is surprised to learn of the inner doubts, personal reflections and boisterous experiences of his former student whom he had known for only three years as a middle school boarding student in the late 1950s. Years later in an effort to explain and understand Brooke's experiences through school and to the end of his life, with his faculty interactions, and himself, Gausman begins editing Brooke's diary entries that describe his boisterous times as a middle school student in a Miami boarding school in the late 1950s. Gausman is able to explain much of Brooke's peculiar behavior at school from his tragi-comic family relationships, schoolmate friendships, and innocent romantic experiences with girls from a nearby school. Brooke's writings follow his maturation journey through competitive athletics, multiple humiliations of being bullied, and later as he becomes intertwined in the political regime of Fidel Castro-slowly unveiling the dramatic events of his short life. Adirondack is a coming-of-age tale that traces the life of a boy and his friends at a Miami boarding school and beyond during a turbulent geopolitical time in South Florida sociopolitical history.
