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Frank
Every family has their hidden crackpot...
For 17-year-old Brogan, it was Uncle Frank. In the mixed imagination of family lore, Frank was known as a chronic gambler, self-proclaimed philosopher, prodigious alcoholic, and an innate con artist. Yet, Brogan knew him only for his birthday cards. They arrived every year, not always on his birthday, with the distinct trace of a gasoline smell, accompanied by a $10 check that Brogan was never allowed to cash, plus Frank's words of advice that ranged from profane to the sublime.
Two days shy of his eighteenth birthday, Brogan awakes on the morning of Thanksgiving break to find that his estranged Uncle Frank is waiting at his doorstep. Haunted by the recent suicide of his best friend, Brogan is seduced by the mystery of Frank, a man he has never met, and his life of risk and abandonment. He agrees to a road trip - not sanctioned by his parents - that will take them from New Jersey to Key West, Florida.
Brogan's future is promising. The best student in his prestigious New Jersey preparatory school, he has recently accepted a full academic scholarship to MIT. But Brogan will discover Frank's world of misfits and mobsters, including Bogota, an enormous ex-mobster transvestite that could rip apart a freight train. Frank's life threatens everyone around him and exposes the hardship of tangled family relationships and the lies and secrets we keep to protect others.
FRANK is a combustible, darkly comic, and intriguing mix of the deadpan ferocity of an underworld chronicle that we see in works like Denis Johnson's Angels and Donald Ray Pollack's The Devil All the Time, with the distinct, surreal touch of David Lynch, if he had ever taken a four-day road trip to Key West.
Book Details
- Publisher: Brogan Camden Publishing
- Publish Date: Feb 1st, 2023
- Pages: 250
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.50in - 5.50in - 0.57in - 0.71lb
- EAN: 9780986182907
- Categories: • Coming of Age• Family Life - Multigenerational• Humorous - Dark Humor
Praise for this book
..one of the best coming of age novels I have ever read. It is sensitive, funny, insightful and moving. Both Frank and Brogan will live on in your readers' imagination. And the ending is pitch perfect-
Doris Kearns Goodwin (Pulitzer Prize winning historian)
A troubled teen embarks on a life-changing road trip with his eccentric uncle in Gibbs' debut coming-of-age novel.
Every year, Brogan Camden receives a birthday card from Frank, a paternal uncle he's never seen or spoken to. Days before Brogan's 18th birthday in 1989, Frank shows up at Brogan's New Jersey home, offering to take his nephew on a trip over the Thanksgiving weekend. The teenager's parents aren't happy about the idea, as the family disdains Frank as a con artist and a gambler, among other things. He sounds like trouble, but that may be just what Brogan wants: He's too smart for his Catholic prep school and haunted by his best friend's suicide. Frank takes Brogan south to Florida, stopping in at such places as a casino and a strip club, providing an "education" on alcohol, fighting, and other dubious pursuits. The two later connect with Frank's enigmatic associate Bogota, a beefy, intimidating man who wears feminine make-up. The author populates his story with a multilayered cast: Brogan is a loner at school whose father's alcoholism nearly destroyed his family. Both the handlebar-mustachioed Frank and the much more compassionate Bogota are steeped in mystery, evading most of Brogan's personal questions. The narrative delves into some dark territory as Frank pulls his young nephew into unsavory situations with seedy individuals. But the three travelers are wholly engaging characters, and Frank's and Bogota's gleefully baffling responses and expressions ("The modern rest stop is a vaudeville theater. A carnival of pain. There are no fixed bridges, Brogan. Remember that. There are no dams") are diverting. Frank's birthday cards throughout the years are a particular highlight; they're full of advice on forging a life path as well as thoughts on sex that are a bit too frank for an adolescent boy.
A fascinating character-driven journey of bonding and introspection. (Kirkus Reviews)