Last Stop on the 6

by Patricia Dunn

Overview

At times hilarious, at times heartbreaking, Patricia Dunn's Last Stop on the 6 is the return of the prodigal daughter to a world of long-buried hurts, political complexities, and female resilience. Set at the dawn of the Gulf War, it tells the story of a young woman grappling with warring identities: that of her upbringing in working-class, Catholic, Italian American Pelham Bay and her new life as a Birkenstock-wearing, vegetarian anti-war activist in Los Angeles.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781599541730
Publisher:	Bordighera Press
Publication date:	11/09/2021
Series:	VIA Folios , #152
Pages:	286
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.64(d)

About the Author

Patricia Dunn is the author of Rebels By Accident. This Italian American, Bronx-raised rebel has traveled the world. These days, she can be found on her living room couch, with her dog Butterscotch, working on her next novel or meeting with aspiring and established writers.

Editorial Reviews

09/27/2021

Dunn marks her adult debut (after the YA novel Rebels by Accident) with this enjoyable story of a woman’s return to her riotous Italian American family in the Bronx on the eve of the Persian Gulf War. During her 10-year absence in Los Angles, Angela Campanosi has secretly become a political activist. She left home after feeling responsible for an accident that left her younger brother, Jimmy, once a promising film actor, in a wheelchair. His upcoming nuptials spur Angela’s mother to send her a one-way ticket home. The timing couldn’t be worse, with Angela at the heart of a large antiwar demonstration, but she agrees to go out of guilt. Back home, Angela reunites with her parents (“Dad was the dreamer and Mommy was the sledgehammer who smashed those dreams into smithereens”); and her childhood friend and crush, Billy, who now works in her dad’s extermination business. But Jimmy is nowhere to be found. Though the answer to Jimmy’s whereabouts is anticlimactic, as is the eventual sibling reunion, there are plenty of colorful escapades, include Billy’s over-the-top sculpture exhibit inspired by his extermination work, and a loan shark on the hunt for repayment plus interest from Jimmy. Dunn’s homage to dysfunctional yet loving relationships comes alive with the inexorable pull of family. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

2021-12-10
A woman returns home to New York City and confronts her past in Dunn’s novel.

Theresa Angela Campanosi, a financially strapped, Italian American activist with a “tough-Bronx-girl vibe,” fled to Los Angeles, consumed with guilt over a fateful night of teenage carelessness that left her brother Jimmy paralyzed. Ten years later, when her mother mails her a one-way ticket home for Jimmy’s last-minute wedding, Angela knows something else is up. Her fears are confirmed when she returns to the Bronx to find Jimmy missing—the first in a string of difficulties that brings Angela in contact with various elements from days gone by: her childhood friend Billy, an artist and recovering addict working for Angela’s family’s exterminating business; her alcoholic father, who’s preoccupied with Jimmy’s childhood acting career; a closetful of plastic saints; and an unsavory man called “Fat Freddy” and his thuggish cronies. As seen through Angela’s eyes, the novel paints a portrait of a Bronx where a progressive anti-war activist still needs a “red slut dress” to do a business transaction with neighborhood muscle. Angela soon reveals herself to be an unreliable narrator, however, whose “bulldozing” manner seems to run in the family: Her mother is the queen in a hive of overbearing personalities, fuzzed by clichés but nevertheless complex in their motivations. The characters’ constant bickering, which sometimes feels more scripted than reflective of real life, brings the novel to a head at Billy’s art show, where “creepy-crawlies” take center stage in more ways than one. Set against the backdrop of America’s 1991 involvement in Kuwait and addressing addictions of all kinds, the novel dabbles in moralism but refuses to sacrifice its fast pace to pause for deep reflection. Ultimately, Dunn’s novel is a primer on the strength of family and the frailty of memory and a reminder that the only way we can truly understand those we love is to stop and listen; after all, Dunn reminds us, “forgiveness can’t happen in silence.”

A novel that brings the Bronx to teeming life with a wry marriage of drama and humor.

Kirkus Reviews