Mikey Walsh, the pseudonymous author of Gypsy Boy, was born fat, ugly and silent. Though he spends his childhood playing dress-up with his older sister, he can't escape his fate.
It's Mikey's bad luck to be born into a family that holds the bare-knuckle fighting crown. At the age of six, he's forced into the ring to fight an experienced adolescent more than twice his age. He's a sitting duck for every Gypsy boy who comes to challenge him. Every loss is followed by a far more brutal beating from Mikey's father--one of the scariest men to walk through a memoir in years, unleashing pitiless blows on his gentle son at every opportunity, then beating the narrator's beautiful mother.
From family violence to the horrors of cockfighting, from stealing bikes to squeezing juice out of slugs as a remedy for warts, Mikey makes the gaudy world of Romany Gypsies in the U.K. erupt into life, interspersing these scenes with moments of tenderness and goofy comedy. The richest aspect of Gypsy Boy is the vibrant characters who populate Mikey's family, arriving noisily in their battered vans: Auntie Maudie, who displays her artificial breasts in pink velour tracksuits; Auntie Minnie, a chain-smoking kleptomaniac; and Uncle Joseph, the only uncle to show the boy kindness, who then ends up raping him repeatedly throughout his childhood.
That this harrowing memoir manages to climax on a note of triumph--as Mikey, having realized that he's gay, breaks free from his family--says plenty about the resilient narrator, a human punching bag who is forced to sacrifice the Gypsy world he loves and the mother he adores to escape into a new life where he can be himself. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle