Asteronga, New York

These eleven linked stories trace the life of a boy growing to adulthood in a small Mohawk Valley factory town in the mid twentieth century. He tells of a special cemetery kept by the undertaker’s daughter, of a malicious boy who was his double, of a murder he and his friends witnessed while on a secret rescue mission. He does not understand why his athletic sister cannot accept death and regrets the part he and a friend play in crippling a local misfit. In adolescence he falls in love with one girl he thinks is lost in a snowstorm and another whom everyone says is a prostitute, and then there is the girl who vanishes into a lake. When his alcoholic uncle dies, he helps to find a fitting placed to bury him. He visits an abandoned graveyard where he learns compassion and in the summer of 1969 he believes that the Virgin Mary has appeared to him.