Say That To My Face
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- 5,49 €
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- 5,49 €
Publisher Description
The story of Joey Frascone, a boy from Yonkers, NY and his eccentric Italian-American family
Joey Frascone is a young kid growing up in tense, violent, racially divided Yonkers, New York in the Seventies and Eighties. His childhood is marked by four different homes, rotating sets of parents, and a whole bag of confused emotions. There are crushes on older girls to comprehend, new boyfriends and girlfriends his parents bring home to contend with, a serial killer on the loose in the neighbourhood, and a whole cast of violent, aggressive Italian-American uncles and cousins that Joey is desperate not to turn into. As he gets older, Joey's teenage dreams pull him away from Yonkers, towards the excitement of New York City, away from his family, but he is still, in many ways, just a handsome, charismatic kid trying to make sense of his world.
Complete with a cast of sassy women, psychotic men, love-lorn teenagers, Say That To My Face has all the colour, charm, violence, nostalgia and schmaltz of an episode of The Sopranos. But Joey Frascone is the hero of this book and male and female readers will fall under his spell in equal measure.
Reviews
‘Only a profound talent can write stories that are at once simple and deep.’ Darin Straus, author of Chang and Eng
‘David Prete is scary good. He is a heartbreaking talent, born to this line of work, our very own Bronx Chekhov.’ Elizabeth Gilbert
‘Heartfelt. Prete aptly draws Joey in all his posturing and hesitant glory.’ Kirkus
About the author
David Prete is a writer and actor living in New York City. SAY THAT TO MY FACE is his first book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this classic New York tale of lost innocence, Joe Frascone grows up running the streets of Yonkers, then embarks on a revelatory cross-country trip and finally winds up back in the city working as a drug mule. Prete's debut novel gets off to a slow start with a series of mundane coming-of-age scenes that establish Frascone's gritty Italian heritage and his difficulty adjusting to his parents' divorce. The action heats up when Joe and two buddies, Mark and Benny, drop out of high school half way through senior year and take off on a cross-country drive. Their trip takes an unexpected turn, and they end up settling for a while in the unlikely locale of coastal South Carolina. The best passages in the book find Frascone back in New York, where he connects with a drug dealer and takes a terrifying trip to Jamaica on which he must swallow dozens of latex-covered marijuana pellets and make it back through customs in a semi-hallucinatory state. Prete combines a tough-guy sensibility with fragmented, episodic storytelling. The effect can be gruffly lyrical, but the pacing is rocky. Still, Prete's complicated affection for neighborhood life and his ability to produce vivid thumbnail sketches of the kind of men who feel at home in dingy pool halls gives his debut authority and individuality. 5-city author tour.