A richly detailed but paint-by-numbers bildungsroman set in the Bronx.
A single early summer night serves as a young man’s proving ground in this coming-of-age novel.
The Bronx, 1960. On his 18th birthday, Joey “Hunt” Hunter plans to take Debby Ann Murphy to the prom, a first date that he hopes will lead to something more. Still haunted by the death of his brother, Toby, the bookish, Fordham-bound Hunt lacks confidence, muscles, and dancing ability—in short, all the things that might make him attractive to his outer borough female peers. Predictably, his birthday is not exactly going as planned. Hunt gets a bloody nose from his dancing partner, Sal “the Butcher” Buccarelli, in his all-male gym class. Later at the prom, Debby turns out to be much more interested in the Butcher than in Hunt. Hunt’s attention wanders, too, when he sees a vision in a blue dress: “At least she seemed like a vision, the dark-eyed girl with flowing hair and a loose easy stride crossing in front of him on the dancefloor.” Hunt doesn’t know her name, and she quickly disappears into the night. His date with Debby fizzles, so Hunt launches a new plan: to celebrate his legal drinking age by barhopping across the neighborhood. Of course, the night continues to take unexpected turns. While the threat of a dangerous gang’s rumored raid on the neighborhood percolates in the atmosphere, the Butcher’s own Brando Boys might prove to be greater trouble for Hunt and his ragtag friends. As the hours tick down to dawn, the confused and heartbroken Hunt searches for love, inspiration, and meaning among the myriad characters of the Bronx. Cioffari (The Bronx Kill, 2017, etc.) portrays Hunt—whose ambitious plans include composing an epic poem about the neighborhood and becoming the preeminent radio DJ in the tri-state area—as a man at odds with his surroundings: “He worried that this place, this Bronx of his heritage, would never be worthy of an epic. What was there that could possibly be heroic about prom night, els, souped-up ’55 Mercs, greaser Romeo football jocks like Sal the Butcher?” Even so, it’s clear that both Hunt and the author relish the milieu, and the book drips with a sincere nostalgia for the time and place. It’s a short novel at just over 150 pages, and it in no sense overstays its welcome, pressing forward continuously at the pace of the Roddle (“part duck-walk, part shimmy and part Lindy”). Despite the many wonderful details about Hunt’s world—his job as a “Desert Rat” selling orangeade at the beach, for instance—the protagonist is a bit too much of a type to be truly compelling. This flatness extends to the supporting cast, which isn’t really all that colorful by the standards of fiction set in midcentury New York. For all of Hunt’s uncertainty, readers will have none: Everything ends up just where they expect, with very little in the way of surprises. The tale may perfectly encapsulate the way a man of Hunt’s generation looks back on his own youth, but it doesn’t make for riveting reading for those with no attachments to that time or place.
A richly detailed but paint-by-numbers bildungsroman set in the Bronx.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-60489-238-3
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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