A trail of murdered mobsters puts three best friends on opposite sides of the law in Giammatteo’s debut crime novel.
Giammatteo turns a genre stereotype on its head with a smart balance of conflicting perspectives that emotionally involve the reader in the New York underworld and its dirty players. Frankie “Bugs” Donovan, Nicky “the Rat” Fusco and Tony “the Brain” Sannullo were inseparable as kids, living by a code of “friendship and honor,” sharing families, stealing cigarettes and watching each other’s backs. Things change after a fight with another gang leaves two teenage boys dead and sends Nicky to prison for a decade. When Nicky gets out, nothing is the same: The girl he loves is married to someone else, Frankie is a cop and Tony is in the mob. With no family to turn to, Nicky’s only recourse is Tony’s criminal connections—and with the mob, murder is never far away. When the bodies of brutally executed mobsters start showing up in Brooklyn, Frankie is given orders to track down the killer. It doesn’t take long for the evidence to lead back to his old neighborhood and his two best friends. The storytelling switches smoothly back and forth, easing from Nicky’s reflections on his childhood difficulties and the respite he found with Frankie and Tony, to Frankie’s struggles to fulfill his professional duties without forsaking his friendships. Ultimately, Frankie must decide whether he is a cop or a gangster, while dealing with the sacrifices that choice entails. Giammatteo’s novel kicks off with the unfortunate impression of being an oversexed, hyper-violent crime drama, yet the author digs deep to find a balance between a psychological thriller and a coming-of-age story. The narrative heat and layered characterization rarely drag, making for an engaging read. A nuanced debut that upends genre stereotypes and readers’ expecations.
Pub Date: April 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-0985030209
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Inferno Publishing Company
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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