Another Elvis Love Child

Janette Jenkins

From Shelf: The White Collection (from my colour coordinated shelves)

This tragi-comic novel explores family life through the eyes of an 11-year-old boy, who has a few dodgy friends, market-stall clothes and a burnt-out school. It evokes Bolton in the 1970s with an undertow of frustrated violence and a backbeat of Elvis and Dean Martin.

Jack is the 11 year old son of an Elvis impersonator who works the clubs at night and fits wigs by day. As his father struggles to break out of the club circuit to bigger things, Jack, a bit of a nerd but more knowing than he seems, starts to come to grips with the bigger things in his own life - like his father's uncanny talent combined with a frightening tendency to violence, other women, his mother's vulnerability, the fact that his school has burned down, his friends are no-hopers and he has nowhere to go. His father is the sun round which the family revolves - big-hearted, unpredictable, too hot for their small lives - and Jack dreams of taking his mother away, though she herself has sadder, smaller plans. Beautifully written, an offbeat tragic-comic novel about families and growing up, which wonderfully evokes Bolton in the seventies, with an undertow of frustrated violence and a backbeat of Elvis, Dean Martin and other all-time greats.

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