Monkey boy : a novel

Summary: Our narrator, Francisco Goldberg, an American writer, has been living and working in Mexico City as a journalist for over a decade, but has recently returned to Boston. He is beckoned back to his home-town outside Boston by his former high school girlfriend who was witness to his greatest youthful humiliations, and his Guatemalan mother, Yolanda, around whom his story orbits like a dark star. Backdropping this five-day trip to his childhood home is the specter of Frank's recently deceased father, Bert, an immigrant from Ukraine who was volcanically tempered, pathologically abusive, yet also at times infuriatingly endearing; as well as the high school bullies who gave him the moniker 'monkey boy.' This autobiographical portrait of a family and of growing up a 'halfie,' unearths the hidden cruelties in a predominantly white, working-class Boston suburb where Francisco came of age and explores the pressures of living betwixt and between worlds all his life. -- Adapted from dust jacket.

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