| Summary: | "Guido and his pals Moreno and Katango are rebels without a cause living in a rural town of the Po Valley, a forsaken corner of the Italian countryside turned peripheral wasteland. Disaffected students of the local vocational high school, they spend their days trying to get high as a way to forget about the bleak hopelessness around them. As children, they enjoyed being the sons of rural folks and the country seemed to them a never-ending reservoir of wonders. Now that they are almost finished with high school, they much prefer to drive to the nearby Rimini and its Riviera, check out its flashy dance clubs and end up wasted on its shores. Male friendship and camaraderie are paramount: the eroticism, the violence, the power struggles--it's all there on the page. Near Guido live the Stancic, a family of Romani who escaped the communist regime of Marshal Tito and settled there just after World War II. Running parallel to the protagonist's coming-of-age is the evolving relationship that the rural town has with this group of outsiders. The author is unsparing in his depiction of the townspeople's cruelty: there is a whole catalogue of ways in which Romani people are scapegoated and made victims of the most absurd prejudice. And yet, there are also many instances of solidarity between Guido's community and the Stancic."--Provided by publisher.
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