All American Boy
A Novel
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A gay man who fled his hometown in a cloud of scandal and guilt returns home to his estranged family—and the boy he left behind
The first call is from Wally Day's estranged mother, begging him to come home. The second is from Sebastian Garafolo, a Brown's Mill cop Wally last spoke to when he confessed to having underage sex in the old apple orchard. Today, Garafolo is calling about something else entirely: Wally's cousin Kyle is missing.
Twenty years ago, Wally fled his hometown in shame. He returns to a place that has barely changed, where he knows who walks the streets by day and who comes out at night. Now, as circumstances force him to confront the events that drove him to leave who he was far behind, Wally must also face dark truths about his family . . . about a shattering night and a crime that still haunts him and shaped the man he has become. If he has any hope of embracing the future, he must first make peace with his past.
All American Boy is a stunning novel about forbidden love, forgiveness, and hard-won redemption.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mann (Where the Boys Are) shifts gears from party-boy frivolity to the tragic consequences of buried family secrets in his most complex novel to date. Back home in pastoral Brown's Mill, struggling gay actor Wally Day reunites with his estranged mother, Regina, who's convinced she's losing her mind. For Wally, memories of home consist of his navy captain father's abuse; the kindness of his transsexual friend, Miss Aletha; schoolyard taunts; and a forbidden relationship with an older man, Zandy, that got Zandy jailed on child molestation charges when Wally was 15. As Wally seeks closure with his past, he becomes infatuated with Miss Aletha's latest teenage runaway, Donald, and frets over the instability of his elderly mother. She harbors memories of a horrible childhood and the shocking death of her sister, Rocky, and she's certain that she's recently murdered Wally's violent cousin, Kyle, and has forgotten where the corpse is. Amid clots of abysmal backstory, Wally comforts his mother and finally faces Zandy, who is now dying of AIDS. Fans expecting a bouncing circuit party might be traumatized by Mann's relentlessly bleak material, though some will be refreshed by his audacious change of pace.
