In this beautiful memoir of a Bronx upbringing, Jerome Charyn evokes with extraordinary accuracy an unusual childhood during World War II. Charyn successfully peels back the years of his life to recapture the innate curiosity, sense of wonder, and uncommon reasoning that all young children possess. And he lovingly reproduces one of the most influential figures of his youth—his mother, The Dark Lady of Belorusse.

Among the facets of novelist and critic Jerome Charyn's literary career is his status as an observer and historian of the cinema. In this entertaining and slightly wacky sequel to his memoir, The Dark Lady from Bellorusse, the roots of his involvement with the art of film become clear. The 11 year-old Jerome, removed from his mother's perspective by a new little brother, finds far more than consolation at the neighborhood movie house, where he not only spends hours of supposed classroom time, but becomes a kind of mascot for a group of new, if rather questionable, friends: the owner of the movie house, some of his henchmen and the local gangster.With his distinctive style, a deep and accurate feeling for time and place, and an uncanny ability to communicate the world as seen by an unusual young boy, Charyn has created another gem of a memoir, a worthy sequel to The Dark Lady from Bellorusse.

Jerome Charyn's three-part memoir of his boyhood in the Bronx has all the imagery and color of an enchanting and entertaining novel—someone has said that it captures the author's world so accurately that it can't possibly be true. Bronx Boy, like The Dark Lady of Belorusse and The Black Swan, both selected by The New York Times as Notable Books of the Year, is a tour de force of memory and imagination. In this third and final installment, the higher truths of a masterly writer's art render moot the question of exactly where the real world ends and Charyn's imagined world begins. Still known as "Baby" although a younger brother has come along, young Charyn makes pocket money delivering eggs, belongs to a group of 12-year-old wannabe gangsters that meet in a soda shop run by an ex-con, and spends afternoons telling stories to the adoring wife of a wealthy Russian émigré. He becomes famous for his black-and-tans—a concoction of coffee ice cream, seltzer, milk, chocolate sauce, crushed pecans—and "a touch of bitterness that may have been the Bronx." So famous, indeed, that he walks away the winner of an annual black-and-tan contest sponsored by the real-life top gangster called "The Little Man" — Meyer Lansky. In Charyn's hands, the often ridiculed Bronx is a magic place, as full of odd and wonderful characters as a three-ring circus. And at the center of it all, young "Baby," not as lucky in love as he would like to be, drinking it all in, putting his own extraordinary take on it. Charyn looks back at this with his singular vision, and records it all for us with the skill of the fine writer he is. This is a delightful and often moving story of a childhood that could only have been lived in New York in the fifties, a New York experience that could only have taken place in the Bronx of those days, a growing-up saga that could only have been captured by this singular author.