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Borough Features
Overview
Once a rising star in print media, journalist Gretchen Sparks just wants to be left alone. Four years have passed since an IED killed her brother in Afghanistan, and Gretchen has managed to shut out everyone who cares about her-except for Marty Mitnik, her editor at a large New York daily. Hard drinking, cynical and surly, Gretchen no longer takes on challenging assignments but resignedly edits her newspaper's Borough Features blog, writing listicles and puff pieces designed to garner clicks.
But when Marty suffers a heart attack, she follows the last assignment he gave her-to a Coney Island woman who claims to possess a crime-fighting seagull.
Gretchen is determined to ignore the signs of a career-making story, but the facts call to her through a host of New York characters: a former beauty queen with a philandering husband, a state senator accepting suspicious campaign contributions, a nefarious Nashville heart surgeon, and a teen boy who begs Gretchen to find out just how and why his grandmother died in the psych ward of a Brooklyn hospital.
Borough Features is about fighting to bring the truth to light in a world that's been dimmed by grief.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9798989328536
- ISBN-10: 9798989328536
- Publisher: Wandering in the Words Press
- Publish Date: March 2024
- Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.61 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.89 pounds
- Page Count: 272
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- 1
Gretchen Sparks, a reporter for a down-at-the-heels New York City newspaper, and the protagonist of Erica Ciccarone’s Borough Features, is a delicious conundrum. She’s not exactly unlikable, but she’s someone you’d best be wary around. She’s an alcoholic and doesn’t seem to understand social cues. Maybe her problematic nature stems from her crazy family, which includes her cloying, long-suffering mother; her father, now afflicted with dementia; and her selfish, silly sister Nico. Some of Gretchen’s troubles certainly stem from her grief over the death of her brother Dominic, a medic killed in Afghanistan.
If anyone loves and understands Gretchen Sparks unconditionally and without drama, it’s her editor, Marty. When the book opens, he’s in the hospital thanks to a heart attack, and it doesn’t look good. Marty and Gretchen are so close that his wife asks Gretchen to write his obituary when the time comes.
Marty is, or was, deeply interested in the local color of the outer boroughs, and when we meet Gretchen, she’s on her way to fulfill his last assignment to her: interview a loony Coney Island lady who claims to have a crime-fighting seagull. Soon after this, she meets a boy named Jaime Padilla, who also has an interesting story. Gretchen and the reader quickly find out that Jaime’s tale is but a tiny piece of a much larger and nastier puzzle. As eager to get to the bottom of a story as ever, Gretchen gets pulled right in.
Ciccarone, who is an associate editor at BookPage, knows much about the folkways, to say nothing of the skeevy politics, of Brooklyn and Queens. Her characters—ridiculous, creepy, heartbreaking and always human—are memorable, none more so than Gretchen Sparks, a woman as devastatingly vulnerable as she is hard and cynical. Borough Features is a great debut.
Gretchen Sparks, a reporter for a down-at-the-heels New York City newspaper, and the protagonist of Erica Ciccarone’s Borough Features, is a delicious conundrum. She’s not exactly unlikable, but she’s someone you’d best be wary around. She’s an alcoholic and doesn’t seem to understand social cues. Maybe her problematic nature stems from her crazy family, which includes her cloying, long-suffering mother; her father, now afflicted with dementia; and her selfish, silly sister Nico. Some of Gretchen’s troubles certainly stem from her grief over the death of her brother Dominic, a medic killed in Afghanistan.
If anyone loves and understands Gretchen Sparks unconditionally and without drama, it’s her editor, Marty. When the book opens, he’s in the hospital thanks to a heart attack, and it doesn’t look good. Marty and Gretchen are so close that his wife asks Gretchen to write his obituary when the time comes.
Marty is, or was, deeply interested in the local color of the outer boroughs, and when we meet Gretchen, she’s on her way to fulfill his last assignment to her: interview a loony Coney Island lady who claims to have a crime-fighting seagull. Soon after this, she meets a boy named Jaime Padilla, who also has an interesting story. Gretchen and the reader quickly find out that Jaime’s tale is but a tiny piece of a much larger and nastier puzzle. As eager to get to the bottom of a story as ever, Gretchen gets pulled right in.
Ciccarone, who is an associate editor at BookPage, knows much about the folkways, to say nothing of the skeevy politics, of Brooklyn and Queens. Her characters—ridiculous, creepy, heartbreaking and always human—are memorable, none more so than Gretchen Sparks, a woman as devastatingly vulnerable as she is hard and cynical. Borough Features is a great debut.