September 1, 2022
Growing up in a roach-ridden home with a mother on crack, hungry, battered, and tauntingly told that he was a weakling, Thomas found respite in fantasy and virtual worlds and eventually became a Pok�mon master. Currently, he's a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania, and an excerpt of this memoir won the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize.
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November 1, 2022
A gritty memoir of a childhood spent at the bottom of the food chain. "Of all the protagonists in this story--both real and imagined--just Joey, the boy, owned an Easy-Bake Oven." In his debut, Thomas announces his unusual approach to memoir in the first sentence: written in third person and including both real and imagined characters. Among the real ones are Popop, Joey's grandfather, and Ganny, who is "better than [Joey's] mother, Keisha, because at least she didn't smoke crack or do it with men for money in front of the kids...even if he saw her as too much a cross between a punching bag and a robot." In addition to the violence, chaos, and slovenliness of Joey's home in the Frankford neighborhood of Philadelphia, there were the cockroaches--and they are everywhere, floating up in the cereal bowl, falling from the ceiling, crawling into his sleeping little sister's ear to bite through her eardrum. As for the imagined characters, the author writes about Goku, the monkey boy from Dragon Ball Z--"among the first people, or things, that Joey wished to be rather than deal with his own inadequate body"--and there were many more, as video games provided the only relief in Joey's life from the infinitely repeated lesson that "human survival dictated that a lot of people got hurt for other people to feel good and alive." At least with video games, he was the one doing the beating and killing, the one who got to feel good and alive. Maybe Thomas chose to write in third person as a way of buffering the misery and cruelty recounted here, but in a first-person narrative of a terrible childhood, the sheer persistence of the I can imply redemption. It takes rare courage to tell a story this harsh and unredeemed. Thank God for video games.
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November 21, 2022
In his wrenching debut, Thomas recounts his foray into nerd culture while coming of age amid squalor and abuse in 1990s Philadelphia. Writing in the third person, Thomas introduces Joey, “a little black man in training” who owned an Easy-Bake Oven, drew sea monsters, and kept a secret list of people he wanted to die, which included his grandfather, Popop, who beat Joey and called him homophobic slurs. Thomas also reflects on his grandmother, who pawned electronics to buy drugs, and his crack-addicted mother, Keisha, who was in and out of jail and had sex with men for money in front of her kids: “Keisha was sick, or high or gone, not a woman.” But Joey’s interest in all things geekdom offered a means of escape. Thomas charts his obsessions with Pokémon, anime, and video games, noting how, when playing the game Crash Bandicoot, Joey was “lulled into an unfamiliar state of comfort from which he did not intend to return.” Thomas’s prose delivers an emotional gut punch, as when watching a group of older boys, he realized, “You want to be them, but you also want to be dead.” The result is a lyrical exploration of identity and survival. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.
January 1, 2023
In Thomas' debut, a memoir written in third person, young Joey grows into himself in spite and in light of powerful forces telling him to do, and be, otherwise. In his smoky Philadelphia apartment, Joey learns not to expect kindness or affection from his almost fully absent mom, there-but-not-there Ganny, and especially not the tyrannical Popop, and seeks connection with a parade of pets instead--Quaily the quail, an alligator called Rex, snakes Spike and Amy. Cruelty awaits outside the home, too, as ""according to local authorities, there was little Joey, the boy, could do which was not gay and therefore worthy of reprimand."" Joey experiences crushing abuse, neglect, sexual encounters, and suicidal thoughts, and yet does the opposite of what Thomas' title might say: he floats on, even swims. Aging from about 8 to 12 on the page, Joey finds endless curiosity and meaning in video games and other adventures, including ones he illustrates himself; tales of vanquished and victorious creatures from hidden depths. A crucial, incomparable act of creation and undefeated imagination.
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December 1, 2022
Thomas grew up in a northeast Philadelphia neighborhood with an extended family headed by his grandfather. Written primarily in the third person, this gripping memoir shows what it was like to come of age in a house filled with violence and neglect. The author's grandfather regularly terrorizes him with both physical and emotional abuse. His mother is addicted to crack and comes and goes, according to her addiction and occasional incarcerations. Their house is infested with cockroaches, which appear throughout the memoir in horrific frequency. Thomas is regularly bullied and abused by the children in his neighborhood and school but finds himself unable to fight back, except in his imagination. He finds solace and escape in video games and fantasies, eventually making friends who have the same interests. This book is a courageous and absorbing examination of one young man's life. This is a riveting memoir that will make readers squirm with its unflinching look at the unvarnished detail of the author's life and circumstances. VERDICT This is a compulsively readable and brave memoir.--Rebecca Mugridge
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