Books
Books
Flight of the Spumonis
What drives a 13-year-old trapeze artist to run away from the circus? Marco Spolini flees an overbearing father, critical stepmother and smothering uncle. A journey of discovery takes him from New York to Los Angeles across a 1980 America beset by economic and political frustration. Accompanied by a 15-year-old multiracial street kid named Jimmy Q and hunted by a relentless, one-eyed female private eye, Marco encounters a legless Vietnam veteran dealing drugs while writing country songs, a former porn star married to a televangelist, a widowed truck driver hauling a bizarre secret, an intellectual motorcycle gang and a noir California. A Huckleberry Finn for our time.
The Boy Walker
Brute Greenbaum faces challenges beyond those of ordinary 12-year-olds. Faded hearing. Dimming eyesight. Bad hips. A penchant for farting. All normal for an English Bulldog equivalent to a human centenarian but only the beginning. A cantankerous lover of literature, rabbinic wisdom, humor and skateboarding, Brute must hold together the remnants of his shattered San Francisco family. Abbie Greenbaum, a 24-year-old dog walker, remains estranged from his college-professor father Morty more than a decade after the deaths of Abbie’s sister and mother. Yet he and Morty still live in the same house. Enter Sarah—a 10-year-old with Down syndrome—and Rivka, her divorced Jewish-Chinese mother who teaches stand-up comedy. Trials posed by mortality, jealousy and long-buried secrets represent nothing—and everything—to laugh about.