Andrea,

Hi. I think I read it first when I was maybe 13 and I was very fond of it then. It was funny, jokey, irreverent, not the standard fair that we were fed at school at the time. I don't know if I saw it as a coming of age book so much. I think I had a lot of the cool eye to the world view from even earlier than that due to my life circumstances as a boy.

I remember identifying more with Seymour Glass, the most tragic of the Glass family members, in Salinger's stories and novellas. I'm weird, though. I mean what 15 year old doesn't think that killing yourself on your honeymoon doesn't make sense on some level?

I think Catcher is a world kids can still recognize today--a world where they can see the things that comprise the boarding school, the NYC scenes in a way that aren't so alien. It's the tenderness of the psyche of the narrator underneath all of that brain-power. That's appealing to teens--that's a big part of the draw of that book.