March 22, 2021
DiDomizio’s breezy if exasperating debut follows an aspiring stand-up comic and his mother on their quest for vengeance against those who broke their hearts. Joey Rossi, 18, finds out his boyfriend, Luke, cheated on him, then his 34-year-old mother, Gia, gets dumped by her married boyfriend, Richard. Mother and son retaliate by vandalizing Luke’s car and trashing Richard’s house, setting a fire that accidentally burns it down. Suddenly, these “felons without a plan,” as Joey terms them, hit the road and seek refuge at a lake house owned by Gia’s ex-boyfriend Marco, in upstate New York. While Gia and Marco reconnect, Joey meets Will, a possible boyfriend. DiDomizio easily captures the strong bond between Gia and Joey, which often runs on trash talk to paper over their self-defeating behavior. And after Joey discovers a series of lies his mother told him, their co-dependency is laid bare (“Emotions aren’t something Mom and I are capable of experiencing separately. They’re always shared”). Unfortunately, some of the metaphors are lazy (“My brain crashes like an old desktop computer”), and an episode where Joey accidentally knocks down a horse-drawn wagon hanging in Will’s lake house is overwrought (“The room explodes into a cacophony of gasps and screams”). This comic novel’s characters may find catharsis, but the humor tends to wear thin for the reader.
March 15, 2021
A seriocomic coming-of-age tale in which a young man describes the many bad choices he and his mother make in less than a week. When life gives 18-year-old Joey Rossi and his mother, Gianna, lemons, they wreak havoc. His boyfriend cheats on him. Her married lover dumps her after two years of promising divorce, dangling the marriage carats. And they've been here before. Gianna was pregnant at 16, and the abusive father was soon gone. Other nasty lovers followed. Now she's 34, working as a hairdresser. Joey has a part-time job stuffing cannoli at Mozzicato's Bakery while he finishes high school. Grandma has Dean Martin's "Volare" on the radio and throws around words like stunad, chadrools, and pisello. They live in Bayonne, "the exact opposite of rich-people New Jersey." They drink Luna di Luna at $16 a magnum and they've had a lot of it when they decide to trash Joey's boyfriend's car and Gianna's lover's seven-figure house in Short Hills ("the capital of rich-people New Jersey"). Only they get carried away in the mansion and start a fire. Soon they're on the road, on the lam, on their way to the rustic rural home of Marco, the one former lover who didn't mistreat Gianna. Is there a happy ending up ahead? DiDomizio creates an appealing mother-son relationship of comfortably shared lives, including a peculiar affection for Monica Lewinsky. (What would Monica do?") He takes a chance with having Joey narrate because he's a young 18 with a tendency to whine at misfortune, which drags on the generally light tone. The humor also often smacks of sitcom, both in predictability and ethnic color. It suggests an elevator pitch to mash up The Sopranos and Everybody Loves Raymond. An uneven but entertaining debut.
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May 1, 2021
When 18-year-old Joey learns that his boyfriend Luke cheated on him, he wants payback. Gia, his young single mother, initially talks him out of it, but when her own boyfriend's infidelities come to light, the two set out on a revenge-fueled, late-night crime spree through the New Jersey suburbs that includes slashed tires, smashed windows, and just a touch of accidental arson. As the reality of what they've done hits them, the two flee upstate to Gia's most stable ex's lake house, where they grapple with their crimes and also begin to make sense of why they constantly push away decent men in favor of scumbags. Aspiring comedian Joey, despite being a teenager, will likely be more relatable to adult readers with his delightful wisecracks and foul mouth, and his relationship with his mother is refreshingly open and honest. This hilarious revenge-filled romp may seem like nothing but fluffy fun at the start, but, on a deeper dive, it's a thoughtful examination of relationships and inherited trauma that will appeal to a wide range of readers.
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