WOLF-BOY
David Fitzpatrick’s new book, Wolf-Boy, is a coming of age YA novel set in Provincetown, Truro, and Dennis Cape Cod during the magical and mystical summer of 1979. Sixteen-year-old Danny Halligan is seeking to define his sexual identity, struggling to navigate his feelings toward eighteen-year old childhood friend Liam Preston. Their lives spiral out of control when they meet 21-year-old Gracie Rose, a charismatic, curvy photographer and Yale dropout with visions of a flesh festival on film.
Danny finds his mind unraveling as he is caught up in a swirling torrent of photography, sex, mysterious potions, and drugs. Entire days are lost in drug fueled grappling and flesh wars in a massive tree fort known as the Palatial Palace of the Palpable Pines. Danny is left mentally and physically ravaged as Gracie gains ever more fame for her ground-breaking prints, known as Transfiguration Photos.
Gracie’s artistic denouement sees her subjects disguised to maintain their anonymity. Liam becomes the Lone Ranger while Danny’s fur-covered mask transforms him into Wolf-Boy.
The word is out…
Wolf-Boy, David Fitzpatrick’s hard-hitting YA novel, is by turns harrowing and heartbreaking yet, ultimately, hopeful. This is a book that deals honestly with real-life issues affecting adolescents, including drugs, suicide, violence, and self-harm, along with burgeoning and complex sexuality. It’s a book that asks big questions about Art with a capital A, family, friendship, and the possibility of recovery from terrible trauma. Set mostly in 1979, when the acronym LBGTQ+ had yet to be created, the novel centers around Danny, a sixteen-year-old who, today, would probably place himself in the Q category: a boy Questioning his sexuality.
But Danny is also Questing. Like a classic hero, he undertakes a perilous journey in search of truth and self-knowledge. Danny’s voice is utterly compelling. He is so smart and funny, so real and touching in his vulnerability that readers will undertake this quest right alongside him, rooting for him every step of the way. Wolf-Boy is a powerful novel from a courageous, skillful and humane writer.
– Hollis Seamon, author of Somebody Up There Hates You
Opening David Fitzpatrick’s debut novel Wolf-Boy, the reader enters the story of a likeable but fragile sixteen-year-old named Danny Halligan who falls under the spell of a seductive but treacherous young photographer (Gracie) and her co-conspirator (Liam), a wild…local boy a few years older than Danny. In this harrowing and compelling tale, Fitzpatrick plumbs the depths of psychological, sexual, and chemical abuse in such a way that you root for the adolescent victim of this duo and worry that the damage inflicted on him will take him past the point of no return. I turned the pages of Wolf-Boy nervously and compulsively, in the grips of a frightening, unforgettable story.
– Wally Lamb, author of She's Come Undone