King of Angels

Book excerpt: 1963. John F. Kennedy is president. Civl rights is catching fire, as another community -- of bachelor men -- is emerging as one to be despised or acknowelged. Ann twevl-year-old Benjamin Rotheberg who lives in a marshy suburb of Savannah, Georgia, with "the most ravishing name in the world," the Isle of Hope, with his mother Caroline, a classically beautiful Southern WASP and his magnetic father Robby, a smark dark Sephardic-Jewish salemsan, is trying to figure out who he is ... Benjamin must change idetities from beign a smart, precocious self-aware kid to masquerading and passing as a regular guy from growing into a sexually curious (and possibly gay) young man to expereince a fragile adolescent innocence and attraction to a pretty girl. King of Angels is about many communties coming together in an explosive time -- Southern Jews, African-Americans, Southern Catholics, an emerging gay one, and the secret underground world of boys, their crushes and conflicts, their attachments and hates. It is also about the seductive attractions of self knowledge and the men and women who open our hearts to it, amidst the struggles of the soul itself to bloom in life and even after death. This is Perry Brass's most stirring and emotionally charged novel, set in the hunting coastal South. -- Publisher's description.