Adam Mansbach was writing novels long before he came up with the verses to the mega-popular Go the F**k to Sleep. With Rage Is Back, he puts an aggressively intelligent teenage narrator at the center of a story that combines nostalgia for the golden age of New York subway graffiti with a bristling portrait of the city's current class tensions.
Dondi Vance has just been kicked out of prep school for selling weed to his classmates, and his mother's kicked him out of their apartment, so he's couch-surfing with a former associate of his father, the legendary graffiti artist Billy "Rage" Vance. Billy fled the city when Dondi was an infant, after a traumatic run-in with a transit police officer in the subway tunnels. Now, after years of studying with shamans in South America, Rage suddenly turns up--and Dondi is drawn into the plan to take down that cop, who's risen in power to become a mayoral candidate.
The story has several odd twists, like a 14-story staircase in a Brooklyn apartment building that enables you to walk into the future. If that sort of thing bothers you, Dondi advises, "then you should cut your losses and go read Tuesdays with Morrie, before I get to the really wild [stuff]." Some of this weirdness is crucial to the plot, while some of it turns out to be mostly atmospheric. The core drama, after all, is about Dondi making peace with his past. On that front, Mansbach totally reels us in. --Ron Hogan, founder of Beatrice.com