"As much a crime comedy as coming-of-age tale, this pitch-perfect evocation of pre-Covid New York captures the dark side of the American dream in all its graft and glitter. In December 2018, we meet Rudy Coyle, a bar owner's son from Flushing, Queens in the throes of a major quarter-life (if he's lucky) crisis. Cut off from the family business, he gets a Hail Mary job as a night doorman in a storied Park Avenue apartment building, where he comes under the wing of the family in 4E, the Cohens. Jacob, their fast-talking patriarch, is one of a generation of moneylenders who made hundreds of millions of dollars in the cutthroat taxi medallion industry in the early 2000s, largely by preying on the hopes and dreams of impoverished immigrant drivers. As Jake tries to stop the bleed from the debt crisis now plaguing his company, clawing back his assets from an increasingly dangerous coterie of Russian-American associates, Rudy goes from errand boy to bodyguard to something like Jake's right-hand man, drawn closer into the world of his neglected son, J. J., his glamorous, unhappy wife, Nora, and his sheltered but perceptive adolescent daughter, Marley, who provides the novel's beating heart. When Marley becomes involved with the son of a rival taxi mogul, Jake's dirty laundry comes to light, and Rudy must choose between his blue-collar conscience and white-collar ambitions. By turns a gripping portrait of corruption and a tender family dramedy, Atta Boy combines the urban cool of Richard Price with the glossy, uptown charm of Taffy Brodesser-Akner"-- Provided by publisher.
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