REal GOod, A novel

REal GOod

A Novel

Queens, New York. The 1970s. Willy Mosseri is eleven years old, the American-born son of immigrants, growing up in a neighborhood that doesn't wait for you to figure yourself out. By the time he's eighteen, he will have navigated a childhood that runs the full spectrum — from the particular joy of belonging somewhere to the particular damage of belonging in the wrong places. Real Good follows those seven years without flinching and without sentimentality, tracing the slow and uneven education of a boy trying to become someone worth becoming.

This is a coming-of-age story that doesn't pretend the age is ever quite come. It ends where it has to: with a choice, and no guarantee the choice will hold.

A note from the author

I grew up in Queens. I know Willy Mosseri the way you know someone you've been trying to understand your whole life. I didn't write this book to settle a score or recover something lost — I wrote it because I kept waiting for it to exist, and it didn't. The 1970s outer-borough childhood, the immigrant household caught between the old world and the new one, the boy who is neither tough enough nor soft enough to fit cleanly anywhere — that story felt unwritten in the way I needed it written.

I've spent forty years performing other people's words. Narrating more than 275 audiobooks will teach you, at the sentence level, what language can and can't carry. What I wanted for this book was prose that trusted the reader completely — short, clean, plain — and a story that earned its ending without explaining it.

Real Good is that book.