Nicky Deuce: Welcome to the Family
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- USD 3.99
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- USD 3.99
Descripción editorial
It’s July, and Nicholas Borelli II’s parents are scheduled to spend two weeks on a cruise. Nicholas will spend those two weeks, as he does every summer, at Camp Wannameka. The night before he’s to leave, however, there’s a phone call: thanks to an explosion in the septic system, camp is canceled. The only place for Nicholas to go instead is to his grandmother’s house in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, New York.
Nicholas’s father grew up in Brooklyn, but you’d hardly know it. An Italian dinner at Nicholas’s house in the suburbs is whole wheat pasta, organic tomato sauce, and, if he’s lucky, a tofu meatball. And Brooklyn? Well, Brooklyn is the place his father left and never talks about. Nicholas has never been there, and he doesn’t want to go now.
But when Nicholas tastes his grandma Tutti’s meatballs for the first time, gets a nickname from his uncle Frankie, and makes a friend in the neighborhood, his feelings about Brooklyn–and family–begin to change.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the start of this zesty collaboration between actor Schirripa (The Sopranos) and author Fleming (Three Weeks in October: The Manhunt for the Serial Sniper), Nicholas Borelli, raised in a tony New Jersey suburb, arrives in Brooklyn to spend several weeks with Tutti, his gastronomically gifted Italian-American grandmother. Soon after stepping into Tutti's apartment, the 12-year-old's indoctrination into this unfamiliar life begins when he tastes his first meatball, "the most delicious thing he'd ever eaten in his life" a far cry from the fare his vegetarian mother serves. But the one who gives the novel its most heady spice is Tutti's hefty, gold chain-sporting son Frankie, who renames his nephew Nicky Deuce ("a good name for a junior goomba"), shows him clips from Hollywood movies that reveal what it means to be a goomba ("an honorable man whether he's a gangster or a lawyer or a cop") and introduces him to some colorful neighborhood characters with names like Sallie the Butcher and Charlie Cement. When Frankie tells Nicky he makes his living "keep an eye on things for some people," and the boy discovers guns and a bullet-proof vest in his uncle's gym bag, he suspects the worst. In a comically ironic twist, Nicky finds out what's what after he and a new neighborhood friend become involved in some illegal goings-on and are taken hostage by a mobster. Given the tale's tangy writing, peppy pace and engaging personalities, are kids likely to put this book down? Fugheddaboudit! Ages 8-12.
