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It was 1977 when a shoeshine boy, Emanuel Jaques, was brutally murdered in Toronto. In the aftermath of the crime, twelve-year-old Antonio Rebelo explores his neighborhood's dark garages and labyrinthine back alleys along with his rapscallion friends.
As the media unravels the truth behind the Shoeshine Boy murder, Antonio sees his immigrant family - and his Portuguese neighborhood - with new eyes, becoming aware of the frightening reality that no one is really taking care of him. So intent are his parents and his neighbors on keeping the old traditions alive that they act as if they still live in a small village, not in a big city that puts their kids in the kind of danger they would not dare imagine.
Antonio learns about bravery and cowardice, life and death, and the heart's capacity for love - and for cruelty - in this stunning novel.
"[An] intricate coming-of-age debut novel." - Publishers Weekly
"De Sa's well-realized coming-of-age story is distinguished by its setting in a traditional Portuguese community on the brink of change." - Booklist
"A largely bleak vision, top-heavy with angst and tragedy." - Kirkus
"Impressive.. [De Sa] has given us a beguiling coming-of-age story - harked back to an event that shocked the country and had massive repercussions - and at the same time managed to beautifully capture a community and an era." -The Toronto Globe and Mail
"Rich and compulsively readable... A novel that, like most of the good ones, is funny, heart-breaking and humane." - The Toronto Star
"Kicking the Sky bridges its polarized worlds, staying true to the humanity in each. It's one of the best things fiction can do." - The National Post (Canada)
"A coming-of-age story with a vengeance - not just an individual, but an entire community - Kicking the Sky also captures a small but enduring turn of the historical screw." - Maclean's
"Kicking the Sky dares to tell the story about the messy dark side of a big city through the clear eyes of a twelve-year-old boy teetering on the fence between observer and victim … A courageous novel." - Jim Lynch, author of Truth Like the Sun
"The intensity and fragility of boys on the cusp of adolescence is vividly captured, as is the portrait of a community whose insularity is both its strength and its weakness." - Shyam Selvadurai, author of The Hungry Ghosts
This information about Kicking the Sky was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Anthony De Sa grew up in Toronto's Portuguese community. His short fiction has been published in several North American literary magazines. Anthony's first book, Barnacle Love, was critically acclaimed and became a finalist for the 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the 2009 Toronto Book Award. Anthony's new novel, Kicking the Sky, is set in 1977, the year a twelve-year-old shoeshine boy named Emanuel Jaques was brutally raped and murdered in Toronto. Anthony graduated from University of Toronto and Queen's University. He is currently a teacher-librarian at Michael Power/St. Joseph High School. He lives in Toronto with his wife and three boys.
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