A Friend of the Family

Résumé du livre

A powerful story of America from Pearl Harbor to the election and murder of JFK, the Berlin wall, Vietnam, the fight for women's equality and the age of student protests that gave birth to the radical groups and gave students the power of the vote.A story of America. Donovan Scali is the illicit child of a married woman and a married man-who are not married to each other. The woman dies in childbirth, and Donovan lives the life of an orphan. After spending the first five years of his life in a convent, Donovan is five years old when he is taken to the South Philadelphia Home for Lost Boys, in the Devil's Pocket section of South Philadelphia. When the orphanage burns down one night, the people of the Devil's Pocket each take one of the children to their home to care for them until the State can make other arrangements. In the O'Connor home, for the first time Donovan has found a family. They are boisterous and rowdy, and he loves the Devil's Pocket and all the people in their neighborhood discovering first love, "No one had ever told Donovan that before. He was always a child someonehad to protect, or make room for, or feel sorry for. The faces changed. Sometimesthey were kind. Sometimes they were cold, but they were always strangers in aplace that was not his place. Even when they liked him somewhat, he neverconsidered someone could love him." Mark Conte is a master story teller who weaves a story of America's growing pains, the laughter and the tears. The triumphs and the sorrows that will break your heart. It is a story for all America.