El Bronx
-
- $6.99
-
- $6.99
Publisher Description
New York's children wage war on the city's rich, with Sidel as the referee
In his years serving the people of New York, Isaac Sidel has often rescued the city from oblivion, but never has he faced anything as dangerous as the current baseball strike. The South Bronx, a wasteland of drugs, murder, and urban blight, is kept from sliding into utter chaos by Yankee Stadium's steady stream of tourists. Every week that the strike continues and the fans stay away, the Bronx slips closer to the edge.
As the crime rate spikes, a lone bright spot remains. Alyosha, a mysterious twelve-year-old graffiti artist, paints dramatic murals to commemorate the dead. When Alyosha befriends the daughter of the lawyer representing the player's union, Sidel sees a possible solution to the Bronx's woes. But there is too much money in baseball for the strike to be settled peacefully. Before the season starts, more blood will stain the sidewalks of El Bronx.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The ninth--and very possibly the best--in Charyn's amazing series about mythical New York Mayor Isaac Sidel features a strange, angry and wonderful Children's Crusade against corporate greed, drugs and violent crime. Sidel is a commanding figure, an intellectual ex-cop and police commissioner in his late 50s who roams his city alone (though armed with a Glock), wearing secondhand clothes and trying hard to hold it all together. His adult cohorts--his daughter, the much-married Marilyn the Wild; her current husband, rogue cop Joe Barbarossa; and the many other policemen and prosecutors whom Sidel has mentored over his long career--are also strong characters. But it's the children who quickly take and hold center stage here. Angel Carpenteros, aka Alyosha (after the character in The Brothers Karamazov, which he claims to have not understood a line of, but we soon know better) is a 12-year-old graffiti muralist who memorializes the gang dead on the walls of the Bronx. Marianna Storm is also 12. She's the daughter of a power-mad lawyer who, during a baseball strike, threatens to bury the Bronx by forcing the Yankees' owner to move the team out of the borough. Marianna bakes cookies for the mayor and fights with a wooden akido sword to keep Alyosha alive. Other children surround and pursue them, including the armed teenaged girls who serve as bodyguards for a brutal Dominican drug lord. Charyn (The Good Policeman; Montezuma's Man; etc.) tells his complicated story with touches of magic realism, bursts of pulp lyricism and a level of energy and imagination as high as anyone writing today.
