Hello everyone. Today I am spotlighting a book called
Last Stop on the 6 by author
Patricia Dunn which is being released on November 9th. I’m also hosting a book giveaway!
Read on for more about the book, a book excerpt and the giveaway details.
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR LAST STOP ON THE 6
“Bravo to Patricia Dunn for creating this uniquely powerful journey from which it is nearly impossible to turn away.” -Mary Calvi, author of Dear George, Dear Mary: A Novel of George Washington’s First Love, Emmy® award winning journalist, anchor for CBS 2 News and Inside Edition
“If you like quick-witted, fast-talking, and street-smart characters who have big dilemmas and even bigger hearts, look no further than Patricia Dunn’s Last Stop on the 6.” -Kathy Curto, author of Not for Nothing: Glimpses into a Jersey Girlhood
“Last Stop on the 6 is a rip-roaring love song to the Bronx, a coming-of-age story about the places that make us, that we try so hard to leave, and that so often pull us home.”- Melissa Faliveno, author of Tomboyland
“Dunn writes with verve and eloquence in this deftly told, gorgeously crafted story that crackles with wry humor and remarkable observations about love, departure, and its aftermath.” – Jimin Han, author of A Small Revolution
“Last Stop on the 6 is one of the funniest books I’ve read—laugh out loud funny—and one of the wisest. A miracle.” -Kathleen Hill, author of Still Waters in Niger, Who Occupies This House, and She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons
“These are characters you will want to know and live with through her novel. Get on that 6 train now and take it until the last stop.” – David Masello, executive editor of Milieu, author of Architecture Without Rules, Art in Public Places, and a forthcoming book from Rizzoli
“A superb book that I couldn’t stop reading.” – Joan Silber, author of Secrets of Happiness, Ideas of Heaven,
and Improvement, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award
“Dunn has introduced me to characters all possessing questions for which there are no easy answers-only the slow and steady reawakenings of familial bonds and moral responsibility. A heartfelt work of art.”- Carolyn Ferrell, author of Dear Miss Metropolitan and Don’t Erase Me
About the book:
LAST STOP ON THE 6 By Patricia Dunn
Can you ever really go home again? Theresa Angela Campanosi is about to find out in LAST STOP ON THE 6 by Patricia Dunn (November 9, 2021; Bordighera Press; $20). This hilarious, hard-hitting and big-hearted novel brings to mind the movie A Bronx Tale as it follows Angela back home to her Italian-American family in the Bronx to prepare for her brother’s wedding.
After a decade as a political activist in Venice, California, Angela is back in her childhood home about to topple her family’s tower of secrets—the truth about her brother’s accident, impending marriage and subsequent disappearance, her alcoholic father’s fall off the wagon, and her former boyfriend’s recovery from heroin addiction. And most of all, why Fat Freddie is tormenting her family.
As Angela navigates love, guilt, and red gravy, she learns the price of living in the past, allowing her parents to squeeze her back into her childhood bedroom, and the cost of redemption. LAST STOP ON THE 6 is the express train back to those feelings we thought we left behind and the heartfelt promise of something better when we face them at last.
PATRICIA DUNN is an Italian rebel raised in the Bronx. She is the author of the young adult novel, Rebels by Accident (Sourcebooks Fire). Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, The Village Voice, The Nation, LA Weekly, and The Christian Science Monitor. Dunn has served as the senior director of the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, where she holds an MFA in creative writing. She is the co-founder of The Joe Papaleo Writers Workshop in Cetera, Italy.
LAST STOP ON THE 6 by Patricia Dunn
Bordighera Press; November 9, 2021
$20; 286 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-59954-173-0
Excerpt from Last Stop on the 6 by Patricia Dunn
Size 9 was printed on the front of the shoebox. Since my mother was barely a size 6, I knew whatever was in that box was for me. The only thing that made her happier than buying shoes for herself was buying shoes for someone else.
“Open it.” She smiled widely, somewhat resembling The Joker from Batman.
Inside the box was exactly what I didn’t want – six-inch sling- back stiletto heels. Mommy thought my five-foot, eight-inch model height was my best feature, and accentuating it was, she claimed, the main reason she focused on my achieving model weight. The only feature these shoes were meant to accentuate was a latent desire to join the ranks of prostitution. But the height of the heels wasn’t the most disturbing part of the shoes. They were dyed to match a color – mauve. Dyed-to-match mauve shoes meant there was a mauve dress I was expected to wear – a bridesmaid’s dress? Was this the big secret Mommy didn’t want me to know yet? She expected me to be a bridesmaid? I don’t know if I was more relieved or repulsed, but I was certain my brother and the bride-to-be had no intention of my being part of their wedding party.
I dropped the shoes back into their box and reached up over the closet to touch the hanging crucifix, which had instilled fear in me since my First Holy Communion. With the exception of a tiny black mole on his cheek, which Jimmy had put there with an indelible Magic Marker, this Jesus’s features were erased. His head leaned to one side, and he was missing the fake-blood color in all those places where he had been nailed to the cross.
After I made my First Communion, everything was Jesus to me. Every day, I’d climb up on a chair so I could kiss Jesus on each wound – the palm of his right hand, the palm of his left hand, and the place where his ankles crossed. Then, one day, Jesus slid down and fell off the cross. Convinced I’d broken Jesus, I started to cry, until Jimmy came into the room, stepped up onto the chair, and standing at my side, demonstrated how Jesus slid up and down.
“See, his body is a panel, hiding a secret compartment.”
The inside of Jesus was empty.
Mommy later told me the secret compartment once held a vial of holy water and two candles, which a priest would need to perform last rites. “Priests don’t need to break glass in case of an emergency, they need to break Jesus open.” It was rare for her to make a joke, and I wanted to encourage her, so I laughed extra loud before I asked, “Who died?”
“No one died.” She stopped smiling. “The candles and holy water vanished.”
When I asked her if Jesus was a magician and could make things disappear, she bent down and whispered in my ear, “Only children who misbehave.”
Giveaway Details: U.S. residents only please.
To enter to win a print copy of
Last Stop on the 6 by
Patricia Dunn:
1. Comment on this post.
2. For an extra entry share this post on your social media and let me know in the comments section.
Thanks everyone.
This contest is now closed. Congrats to C. Lee!” Thank you for entering and sharing. Happy reading!
Special thanks to Meryl Moss Media for making this possible.
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