Showing results for "Boone" in Coming of Age

New Orleans, 1982. Voodoo spells, prostitutes, prisoners, and veterans who are adamant about the size of their manhood—it's all just another day at Charity Hospital, also known as The Big Free. It's a medical free-for-all with the toughest trauma surgery in America, and Elizabeth—fresh from medical school in Charleston, wearing pearls and pink plaid socks—is one of the first women to work there. Half of the doctors who start the surgery program never finish. Nothing in her proper Southern upbringing prepared Elizabeth for the gritty and gruesome world she now experiences on a daily basis.

Taking its inspiration from Great Expectations, this novel teases us with the question of what Pip might have been like had he grown up in the American South of the 1960s and 1970s. A guilty encounter with an escaped felon, a summer spent working for an eccentric man with a mysterious past, conflicted erotic feelings for his employer’s niece and nephew—these events set the stage for a journey of sexual and moral discovery that takes Newt Seward to New England, Rome, and Paris—all before returning home to confront his life’s many expectations and disappointments.