Jo-Jo is a soldier on the front line of Alphabet City, the notorious neighborhood on Manhattan's Lower East Side where professional hipster couples compete with drug dealers and muggers for control of the streets--and vie with welfare families for possession of the area's crumbling buildings. Jo-Jo and his pregnant French wife were desperate when they moved into the neighborhood--the very slums that his grandmother and parents had spent their lives working to get out of--and risked everything to join other homesteaders rebuilding the shells of buildings that had been abandoned by their landlords. Now Jo-Jo and Annabelle's daughter goes to daycare across from where they live and Jo-Jo finds himself fighting to make a home for his family amidst the random violence and killing poverty of a bizarre urban frontier--where the rule of survival is dog-eat-dog. "Gripping, realist fiction...What gives the novel life, though, is not its casual cynicism, but its unerring portrayal of street life, a constant source of drama and entertainment...compelling." --Kirkus Reviews “Sharp, savage and extremely well written.” --New York Times Book Review
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Joe Peltz and his wife, Annabelle, sink their money into six apartments in a rundown building on Manhattan's Lower East Side, on the same block where Joe's immigrant family lived upon arriving in New York, a ghetto they abandoned for the haven of Brooklyn. So begins this energetic but unfocused tale of struggle in an often hostile new home. This first novel is replete with Joe's bold street language, unflinching descriptions of crime- and drug-filled Lower Manhattan and colorful portraits of Joe and Annabelle's robin/if this is still too long you can delete the description of the neighbors from "Spike...cats" and add here "motley crew of" but i'd prefer to keep it/pk neighbors: Spike, the green-haired up-and-coming artist, and his overbearing girlfriend, Mazie; Scarlet B, resident gossip who's had affairs with most of the building's men; and Mewie, loudmouthed, gay and proud owner of 15 cats. The action turns ugly when a fire erupts in the apartment of Carlos DeJesus, the co-op building's only Puerto Rican and sole remaining renter. Arson is suspected, and Joe, president of the co-op board, is arrested. He is, we realize, telling his story from jail. Several of this book's 33 chapters were previously published in magazines, including Between C & D (of which Rose is publisher), and, indeed, the chapters would be more successful as short stories than they are as elements of a novel. The outcome here is vaguely tragic but ultimately the work is opaque, tedious, repetitive and flimsy.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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