“Green Grass Grace” is easily one of the best things I’ve read in the last 20 years – you should get a copy. It’s beautifully written, extremely funny but also a beautiful story of family, friendship, and young love.

From Amazon:

Henry “Hank” Toohey, a thirteen-year-old altar boy, is an incessant smart-ass with a deep love of life…and other four-letter words. But with his foul mouth comes a heart of gold, and he’s going to need it to get through the last weekend of summer 1984.
Everyone up and down St. Patrick Street, Henry’s claustrophobic Irish-Catholic block in Philadelphia — with its seventy-eight row homes, seventy-eight skinny mile-high lawns, seventy-eight statues of saints, and seventy-eight Mondale-Ferraro signs — knows that the Toohey family is falling apart.
Gritty, giddy, and bursting with Henry’s boundless energy, Green Grass Grace is a heart-thumping rocket ride back to adolescence that is riotously funny and tragic at the same time.