Eighteen-year-old Stony De Coco has to make a choice: either join his father in the tightly knit world of New York's construction unions or take off and find his own path. But Stony's family is not about to make that choice easy. As he tries to protect his little brother, Albert, from their dangerously unbalanced mother, and to postpone the difficult adult responsibilities that await him, he finds hope in a job working with children at a hospital—a job that promises not to make anyone happy but Stony. Richard Price's is a soulful and often profane story of working-class life in the Bronx, and one young man's bruising initiation into adulthood.