Vorab-Rezensenten

Read by the author Matthew is a sixteen-year-old boy living in Jackson Heights, Queens, in 1976. In the span of a few short months he loses his two most important male role models: his father and grandfather. His mother (receiving a much larger inheritance than expected) decides to uproot Matthew and herself and move to a posh apartment building on the East Side of Manhattan. Although only three miles away from his boyhood home, "The City" is a completely new and strange world to Matthew. On the cusp of being an adult but up until now rather innocent and unworldly, Matthew (now attending an exclusive prep school) is introduced to all the totems of manhood (love, sex, alcohol, drugs, driving a car, and working a job), all in a brief, intense, and compressed period of time. In the midst of this coming of age, Matthew becomes friend (and quasi assistant) to Lou Reed, who lives with his transgender girlfriend Rachel in the same building as Matthew. The drug-addled, artistic/shamanic Lou Reed eventually becomes an unorthodox father figure to Matthew who finds himself head over heels in love with the mysterious Veronica, a wise-beyond-her-years girl he meets at his new school.