From Amazon
Whoever Billy Mann's mother was, she wasn't one to mince words. "Eddie's Bastard" is the only inscription on the note taped to a picnic basket containing the infant, which is left on the doorstep of "herbalist and failed entrepreneur, Thomas Mann Junior." The depressed Mann immediately accepts that the child is the offspring of his own son, Eddie, recently killed in Vietnam, and sets out to raise him.
Grandpa had been a father in a time when men had nothing to do with the actual day-to-day business of raising children. Men didn't change diapers, warm bottles, or nurse babies. As a result, it was Grandpa's wife, and not Grandpa himself, who knew how to do all these things. Had she still been around, no doubt she would have taken over the business of raising me herself. But she--my grandmother--was no longer present to discuss it with; she'd simply disappeared one day when my father, Eddie, was still little, just after the Fiasco of the Ostriches, and Grandpa had never heard from her or of her again.
Still, Grandpa perseveres and baby Billy prospers under his unconventional care. As a child, Billy leads an isolated life--he is home-schooled, and their nearest neighbors, the Simpsons, live half a mile away and are on bad terms with Grandpa anyway. But Billy has his family history to keep him company--the Manns were once prominent and wealthy, before the ostrich débacle--not to mention the ghosts who share the Mann house and occasionally play tricks on the living inhabitants. At age 7, however, he ventures further afield than his backyard and meets Annie Simpson, a little girl with a terrible secret.
While Billy's relationships with his grandfather and his childhood friend are central to the novel, William Kowalski packs his story with lively subplots including a family curse, the identity of Billy's mother, and a legendary diary belonging to a Mann ancestor. Eddie's Bastard is a coming-of-age story that doesn't take itself too seriously. Though the standard elements of domestic drama are all here--abandonment, child abuse, alcoholism, death, and loss of innocence--whenever possible, Kowalski prefers to leaven his tragedy with a wink. Only a comedian would bankrupt a family with ostriches, after all. --Alix Wilber
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
In his ambitious, bittersweet first novel, Kowalski explores the world of a boy growing up in a small upstate New York town called Mannsville who must find his place in the shadows of nearly mythic ancestors. In infancy, narrator Billy Mann was left on his grandfather's doorstep, with a note identifying him only as "Eddie's bastard." Billy's bitter, proud and often drunk grandfather tells him that Eddie was a larger-than-life hero whose plane was shot down over Vietnam. Growing up, Billy is regaled with tales of other legendary Manns, whose "natural tendency toward greatness" stretches back more than a century. Yet the grandfather also paints himself as a fool who lost the family fortune with an ill-conceived idea for an ostrich farm. Billy endures a lonely, isolated childhood and adolescence, countered primarily by his rich imagination, his courage and his friendship with neighbor Annie Simpson, whose abusive, poor white trash family is the antithesis of the lineage-proud Manns. Kowalski layers the past effectively, blending the grandfather's oral history with Billy's own coming-of-age narrative. Although the vaunted Mann fortune derives from simple luckAthe discovery of blood-tainted, Civil War-era buried treasure on their propertyAthe mythic tales inspire Billy to some noble deeds of his own, and he assumes the mantle of family storyteller so the legends will endure. Though at times it veers into dramatic overload, the novel is ultimately an absorbing, redemptive exploration of a young man's search for himself, wresting an identity out of generations of secrets. Agent, Anne Hawkins of John Hawkins & Assoc. 75,000 first printing; major ad/promo; author tour; rights sold in Germany, England, Spain and the Netherlands; Harper audio. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
