Kill the Poor

Jo-Jo is a soldier on the front line of Alphabet City, the notorious neighborhood on Manhattan's Lower East Side where professional hipster couples compete with drug dealers and muggers for control of the streets--and vie with welfare families for possession of the area's crumbling buildings. Jo-Jo and his pregnant French wife were desperate when they moved into the neighborhood--the very slums that his grandmother and parents had spent their lives working to get out of--and risked everything to join other homesteaders rebuilding the shells of buildings that had been abandoned by their landlords. Now Jo-Jo and Annabelle's daughter goes to daycare across from where they live and Jo-Jo finds himself fighting to make a home for his family amidst the random violence and killing poverty of a bizarre urban frontier--where the rule of survival is dog-eat-dog. "Gripping, realist fiction...What gives the novel life, though, is not its casual cynicism, but its unerring portrayal of street life, a constant source of drama and entertainment...compelling." --Kirkus Reviews “Sharp, savage and extremely well written.” --New York Times Book Review