White Guys: A Novel
3.5/5
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About this ebook
Inspired by actual events, Giardina has created a masterful and explosive social novel about the price of the American dream.
After graduating from high school, in the early 1970s, Billy Mogavero is the only one of a tight-knit group of five friends who didn't make it out of Winship, a hardscrabble town outside of Boston. Twenty years later, the other four--who have made their way, to varying degrees--decide to return to Winship to visit Billy, once their galvanizing alpha male and now a paint salesman who lives at home with his mentally handicapped brother. Their reunion sparks a rapid-fire chain of events as Billy finally makes the social leap his friends have spent their lives making--to suburban respectability and conformity.
Enthralled by the rapidity of Billy's climb--his marriage to an equally ambitious and tough Irishwoman, Maureen, included--his best friend, Timmy O'Kane, sees in Billy's protean character and masterful adoption of middle-class norms a vital and necessary critique of his cozy existence--paid for by his wealthy wife--in a privileged Boston suburb. But when Billy, Maureen, and their unborn child are victims of a drive-by shooting in which only Billy survives, Timmy is ensnared in a series of events that threaten to spin entirely out of his control. His complicity in the aftermath of the tragedy threatens the hardwon security of his leafy, suburban idyll--but is also strangely and seductively liberating.
Anthony Giardina
Anthony Giardina lives in New England. ‘The Country of Marriage’ is his first book.
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Reviews for White Guys
12 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The book opens in the 1970s in Winship, Massachusetts, a middle-class suburb of Boston. The narrarator is Timmy O'Kane. The book follows Timmy and his friends through the last year of high school, college, and then work and family life. The friend who is the center of the book and Tim's life is Billy Mogavero, who deviates drastically from the life path that his friends have chosen. The character development was excellent with lots of nuances, and the story has some shocking twists. Midway through the book, though, the story begins to deteriorate, and Timmy turns into a whiner with no backbone, and the reader is questioning what Tim is getting out of his relationship with Billy. But this reader kept on going, hoping for a big payoff at the end, which never comes. So overall, a disappointing read.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Engaging story of five childhood friends growing up in an Italian neighborhood. Story revolves around one of the gorup--an on again-off again hoodlum. Really a story about what makes people happy and whether a middle-class lifestyle does the trick.