Academy of Unholy Boys
A scintillating, pulsing coming of age novel that ricochets around the sleepy, affluent shoreline town of Gently, Connecticut. Partly an LGBTQ+ love story, other times an obsessional and dark fable, the only lacking element is a moral compass.
Isolated sixteen-year-old Jay Souther is a rising sophomore at St. Andrew’s High School for Boys. Full of buoyancy and verve, Jay tries out for varsity football and makes the team as a third-string punter, but Jay is not prepared for the swirling darkness poised to consume him. He tries to outrun his attraction to Foster Gold, one of the football team leads, but eventually embraces his bisexuality, and is better for it.
What Jay doesn't realize is the object of his attraction, Foster, is the ringleader for some excruciatingly malevolent plans. Foster is joined by six five, 235-pound two-time Parade All-American, Latino superstar Bear Santos. Bear is perpetually falling in and out of love with his best friend, Foster.
Bringing in love and light to this wild fable is the skateboarding waitress, Basil Sous, a sophomore at Gently Public High and her new pal, Tuck Reis, a neurodivergent senior at St. Andrew’s. Both Basil and Tuck grow close with Jay and use their natural empathy and compassion to chip away at the toxic masculinity of Foster’s rhetoric. Will it be enough for Jay to break free of the seniors’ cult-like influence in time to prevent an impending tragedy?
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Academy of Unholy Boys is ideal for readers drawn to intense explorations of adolescent identity and toxic masculinity within LGBTQIA+ narratives, blending dark fables with raw emotional struggles. ~ The Story Graph
Captivating readers….
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