First published 2021
Francisco Goldberg, an American writer living in Mexico, escapes to New York City after his journalism provokes dangerous threats. His last relationship collapsed five years ago, but he begins to find hope with a young Mexican woman he meets in Brooklyn. Then a high school girlfriend calls him back to his childhood home outside Boston. Francisco makes a five-day trip to visit his Guatemalan mother Yolanda, whose fading memory still holds fragments of their shared past. The ghost of his recently dead father Bert haunts the visit. Bert was a Ukrainian immigrant who abused Francisco yet could also charm him. Francisco confronts memories of the Guatemalan woman who helped raise him and the high school bullies who tormented him with the nickname "monkey boy." Growing up mixed race in a white working-class suburb left deep wounds. Francisco has spent his life caught between worlds, never fully belonging to any single identity. This return home forces him to examine the cruelties he endured and the fractured pieces of his Jewish, Catholic, white, brown, native, and expat selves.
Genres: american-fiction, abuse, biographical-fiction, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, found-family
Setting: Boston, Brooklyn, Guatemala, Mexico, New York City
Period: Contemporary
336 pages · Hardcover · Grove Press UK
Content warnings: abuse, emotional-abuse