Karen Ann Cullotta

From J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye to S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, classic male coming-of-age stories attract generations of readers by delivering plainspoken narratives that seem to bleed from the page, yet are neither maudlin nor precious. Such is the case with author Mark Slouka’s evocative new novel, Brewster, which, despite delving bravely into despairingly dark subject matter, is still somehow infused with hope and light, achieving a sort of literary chiaroscuro.

Jon Mosher, the novel’s hero, is a bright yet troubled 16-year-old track star whose German-Jewish immigrant parents survived the Holocaust only to have their comfortable suburban life in Brewster, New York, destroyed by the death of their young child. While the family patriarch buries his pain by working long hours at his shoe store in town and escaping into an endless stack of books at night, Jon’s depressed and delusional mother has suffered a mental breakdown, and even worse, blames Jon for his brother’s accidental death by electrocution.

For Jon’s best friend, the brooding, enigmatic Ray Cappicciano, fate has dealt him not only a sadistic, alcoholic father, but also an absent mother and stepmother, both of whom have abandoned their sons over the years, leaving the boys in a decrepit house ruled by a violent drunk.

Still, Slouka’s achingly realistic rendering of teenage romance, friendship and high school track team camaraderie is as often comic and delightful as it is brutal and devastating. While the teenage friends in Brewster rarely step across their hometown’s borders, Slouka has aptly juxtaposed the carnage of the Vietnam War with the rumbling social revolutions playing out across the nation during the Woodstock era. For example, Slouka’s portrayal of the tension-fraught relationships between hippie teenagers defying the dictums of parents belonging to the “greatest generation” is not painted with broad strokes of right and wrong, but rather, a sad gray hue of moral ambiguity.

It would not be an overstatement to suggest that Brewster could become the latest addition to the American canon of coming-of-age stories, enchanting readers with its soulful story of love, loss and the vagaries of the teenage heart.

Perhaps fledgling author Dagmara Dominczyk intended irony when christening her debut novel The Lullaby of Polish Girls. Readers expecting a tender coming-of-age story should be warned that Dominczyk’s brutally raw narrative is less a soothing lullaby than a gut-wrenching ballad of heartbreak and healing amongst three childhood friends in a small town in Poland in the early 1980s.

Dominczyk, an actress who was born in Poland, immigrated to New York City at the age of seven. Her father was imprisoned and later deported because of his work as a founding member of the workers’ union Solidarity, and she has imbued The Lullaby of Polish Girls with the passion and authority of a writer whose fiction resonates with a realism likely forged by personal experience. To be sure, when Dominczyk’s heroine Anna immigrates to Brooklyn with her parents, she is torn asunder from all the comforts of her familiar, albeit hardscrabble, homeland. Thus, when an adolescent Anna is finally allowed to spend the summer with her grandmother in Kielce, Poland, her newly forged friendships with Justyna and Kamila quickly become the foundation of her fragile young life.

While the girls’ posse is renewed and cherished upon Anna’s return to Poland each summer, a decade later, the close-knit trio has scattered—Anna unraveling emotionally, despite her success as an actress in New York, Kamila fleeing to join her parents in Michigan after a devastating divorce, and the wild child Justyna, struggling to accept her domestic roles as wife and mother in Poland. Despite their geographic estrangement, when tragedy strikes—the murder of Justyna’s husband—the three friends are reunited again in a melancholy and impromptu reunion in Poland that proves as unsettling as it is cathartic. 

If Dominczyk’s graphic language and reliance on one particular profanity punctuates far too many of her novel’s sentences, she redeems herself when describing her beloved homeland. Above all, Dominczyk aptly captures the immigrant’s sense of alienation and homesickness, as she does the resentment and abandonment experienced by those who are left behind in a country decimated by decades of poverty and political unrest. 

For readers well-versed in the lore of American literary legends, it is no secret that the late, great writer Dorothy Parker did not suffer fools gladly, be it a louche ex-lover, or a book reviewer relying on a tired cliché like the one above.

In fact, it is with immense courage that in her latest novel, Farewell, Dorothy Parker, author Ellen Meister has resurrected the ghost of Mrs. Parker as the acerbic, supernatural alter ego to the novel’s neurotic, albeit loveable, heroine, Violet Epps. Never mind that her poison-pen film reviews and razor-sharp wit are both feared and revered by Hollywood insiders; at heart, Violet is a quivering mess, paralyzed by her debilitating insecurities, stemming from a dysfunctional relationship with her late sister and the aftershocks of a painful divorce.

While Violet comes off as a bit of a shallow wimp at the start of the novel (she brings her yappy little dog, Woollcott, with her everywhere, à la Paris Hilton), readers who remain patient will soon be rewarded—in particular, with the appearance of Parker, whose irrepressible spirit is trapped and then released from the pages of an old guest book at the historic Algonquin Hotel.

Without spoiling any plot surprises, after Violet is visited by Parker’s friendly and oft-inebriated spirit, she finds the inspiration to take control of her own lackluster love life, and above all finds the strength to engage in a custody battle for her beloved niece, Delaney, who was orphaned after her parents died in a car crash.

Of course, Violet never quite acquires her ghostly mentor’s pugnacious spirit and, despite her success as a movie critic, does not seem to possess Parker’s immense literary gifts either. Still, Violet is by far a kinder and less self-absorbed scribe, and in the end, appears to escape the sad fate of so many great writers like Parker, whose words remain immortal, yet who were haunted by drink, despair and depression during their tumultuous lifetimes.

Janis Owens’ Southern Gothic American Ghost is equal parts mystery and thriller, populated with slippery characters inhabiting a backwoods swampland hamlet forever haunted by a Depression-era lynching. Indeed, Owens based her fourth novel on the infamous 1934 lynching of Claude Neal in Marianna, Florida. Still, while the novel is rooted in a real-life incident, it remains a pure work of fiction in the best sense: a rich portrayal of a small town where the lines between black and white become blurred—not only in regard to race, but in the Hendrix code of honor, too.

Readers are taken through this mesmerizing tale by its teenage heroine, Jolie Hoyt, who, like Owens, is the daughter of a Pentecostal preacher. When the story begins, Jolie appears destined for a sad, small life punctuated by poverty and hopelessness in her hardscrabble hometown of Hendrix, Florida—until she falls hard for a visiting anthropology student, Sam Lense. Hailing from a Jewish family in Miami that holds its own bitter secrets, Sam claims to be researching the history of Hendrix’s indigenous Indian tribes, but his true agenda is far more personal, and hinges on the town’s racist past. When the couple’s hasty, albeit heartfelt, engagement is shattered by violence, the young lovers are torn asunder.

Still, the heart of the story is the decades-old lynching, which remains incendiary for survivors on both sides. Owens writes powerfully of Jolie’s epiphany as to the magnitude of the horrors that continue to haunt her hometown: “In the darkness she could imagine it precisely: the tree and the dust, the press of the crowd and the shouting. If she closed her eyes, she could almost smell the stink of the slaughterhouse—the blood and skin and rot of decomposition that Kite must have foreseen himself, being raised on a farm.”

Despite its dark subject matter, the novel is infused with light and hope—no small feat, given that the novel gracefully weaves everything from anti-Semitism and hate crimes to first love and family loyalties into the story. American Ghost is sure to resonate with readers long after its stunning final pages.