Say That To My Face

The story of Joey Frascone, a boy from Yonkers, NY and his eccentric Italian-American family

Joey Frascone is a young kid growing up in tense, violent, racially divided Yonkers, New York in the Seventies and Eighties. His childhood is marked by four different homes, rotating sets of parents, and a whole bag of confused emotions. There are crushes on older girls to comprehend, new boyfriends and girlfriends his parents bring home to contend with, a serial killer on the loose in the neighbourhood, and a whole cast of violent, aggressive Italian-American uncles and cousins that Joey is desperate not to turn into. As he gets older, Joey’s teenage dreams pull him away from Yonkers, towards the excitement of New York City, away from his family, but he is still, in many ways, just a handsome, charismatic kid trying to make sense of his world.

Complete with a cast of sassy women, psychotic men, love-lorn teenagers, Say That To My Face has all the colour, charm, violence, nostalgia and schmaltz of an episode of The Sopranos. But Joey Frascone is the hero of this book and male and female readers will fall under his spell in equal measure.