The Bookie's Son
by Andrew Goldstein
This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date May 01 2012 | Archive Date Apr 10 2013
(sixoneseven) books | AuthorBuzz
Description
The year is 1960 and the place is the Bronx. All twelve-year-old Ricky Davis wants to do is play stickball with his friends and flirt with the building super's daughter. But when his father crosses gangster Nathan Glucksman and goes into hiding, Ricky has to take over his father's bookie business and figure out a way to pay back his debt-before the gangsters make good on their threats. Meanwhile, Ricky's mother, Pearl, a fading beauty of failed dreams, plots to raise the money by embezzling funds from one of her boss's clients: Elizabeth Taylor.
Fast-paced, engrossing and full of heart, The Bookie's Son paints the picture of a family forced to decide just how much they're willing to sacrifice for each other-and at what cost.
Andrew Goldstein is in the third act of his adult life. Act I: Husband, writer, tree planter, assistant librarian, organic orange and olive farmer, school bus driver, Zamboni driver, editor, tennis pro, stock broker, power transformer tube winder. Act II: Father, no longer writer, custom builder, youth soccer coach. Act III: Grandfather, table tennis player, writer again, lives in Concord, Massachusetts and enjoys waking up each morning to the birds chirping and the day that awaits him. The Bookie's Son is his first novel.
Advance Praise
"In this rollicking debut, Andrew Goldstein captures the Bronx in 1960 with vivid detail and larger than life characters...a menacing and a hilarious read."
--Ladette Randolph, author of A Sandhills Ballad and the editor-in-chief of Ploughshares.
"I love and admire this book. I'll read it every three years after I forget some of the best parts." --Stuart Horwitz, poet and essayist, founder of Book Architecture
"Wow. This is a great novel. Brilliantly written, it reminds me of a combination of Angela's Ashes and David Sedaris. Deeply insightful as well as very funny."--Sophie Powell, author of The Mushroom Man
"The Bookie's Son has OSCAR-WINNING-MOVIE written all over it. It gets more heart-wrenchingly hilarious, and more hilariously heart-wrenching with each read!!" --Terri Kelley, host of TV show Books and Authors.
"I loved this book. It is told through the eyes of a young boy observing life in the streets and tenements of the Bronx, while trying to save his father from his fate. Ricky and his ancient, emotional grandmother run a bookie business from their tiny kitchen, and Ricky is condemned to stay home to answer the phone in case bets are called in. The characters are richly described and so real that you can recognize them. And yet they are also dreamlike and Dickensian in size - at times absurd and comical, and at other times dark and evil. A must on your summer reading list." --Jenny Phillips, author and documentary film producer of The Dhamma Brothers
Available Editions
| ISBN | 9780984824502 |
| PRICE | |
