Author: David Hirshberg

With the opening line of—“When you’re a kid, they don’t always tell you the truth”—you know you have really set a high bar for yourself. It is like the baseball player who hits a home run on his first at bat. Some cynics say that it can only go down from there. But in this case, David Hirshberg not only hit it out of the park with his first swing, his debut novel keeps smacking balls over the fence, right through to the end. This opening line lays bare one of childhood’s essential mysteries: that often, what parents and other adults say is usually what is most convenient for the adults.

The narrator starts out with a beautiful setup: “Reflected in it is a story with a tale both personal and universal that I’d skirted around gingerly for all these years, a memoir about betrayal, disease, gambling, death, bribery, persecution, kidnapping, war, politics, escape, loyalty, forgery, unconditional love, depression, Marines, theft, girls and a dog. In it you’ll find extraordinary revelations about members of my family and the world we lived in, beginning at a time when I caught a glimpse into adulthood, or, as I think about it now, perhaps this was simply the first peep into the rearview mirror of childhood.” Who knows what is true and what is a feint in this outstanding novel that is hard to believe is the first bit of writing from this author. He keeps you guessing, because that is what life is really like, rarely a straight line from A to B, more often a set of paths that sometimes circle back to the beginning, so that you have to reassess what you thought you knew.

The language is musical, the humor is palpable, the narrative is riveting, the characters are fully developed; you care about them, perhaps because you know someone like them or maybe there is a part of you in one or more of them. And Hirshberg ties up the multiple threads into a comfy blanket that you can snuggle up with, ruminating on how he uses the events of the first half of the 20th century as a mirror to reflect the current issues that are in the news every day—immigration, war, communicable disease, the business of sports, and political shenanigans that have come to define early 21st century America.

It is quite a feat, and this spectator is in the stands, clapping for this rookie author who looks like he is going to be an All-Star.—Amazon Customer Review, Alexander, Verified Purchase, 5.0 out of 5 stars