Mikey Walsh, the pseudonymous author of Gypsy Boy, was born fat, ugly and silent; even when he falls down the church steps as an infant and lands face-down, he doesn't make a sound. Though he spends his childhood playing dress-up as Aunt Sadly with his older sister, Frankie, he can't escape his fate: all Gypsy men, he tells us, "have to fight as part of their day-to-day life."
It's Mikey's bad luck to be born into a family that holds the title for the bare-knuckle fighting crown. At the age of six, he's forced into the ring to fight an experienced adolescent more than twice his age. He's a sitting duck for every Gypsy boy who comes to his family's camp to challenge him. That they beat him is bad enough, but every loss is followed by a far more brutal beating from Mikey's father--one of the scariest men to walk through a memoir in years, unleashing pitiless blows on his gentle son at every opportunity, then beating the narrator's beautiful mother (especially when she tries to protect Mikey).
From family violence to the horrors of cockfighting, from stealing bikes from the local sports center to squeezing juice out of slugs as a remedy for warts, Mikey makes the gaudy world of Romany Gypsies in the U.K. erupt into life, interspersing these scenes with moments of tenderness and goofy comedy. The richest aspect of Gypsy Boy, though, is the vibrant and multidimensional characters who populate Mikey's family, arriving noisily in their battered orange-and-brown vans: Auntie Maudie, who displays her artificial breasts in pink velour tracksuits; Auntie Minnie, chain-smoking kleptomaniac queen of the shoplifting circuit; and Uncle Joseph, the only uncle to show the boy kindness, who then ends up raping him repeatedly throughout his childhood.
This harrowing memoir batters the reader with a no-apologies account of a life of cheating and swindling, a brutal education in petty crime interspersed with constant child abuse. That it manages to climax on a note of triumph--as Mikey, having realized that he's gay, breaks free from his family with the help of a friendly, blue-eyed barman--says plenty about the spunky, resilient narrator, a human punching bag who is finally forced to sacrifice the Gypsy world he loves and the mother he adores to escape into a new life where he can be himself. --Nick DiMartino
Shelf Talker: The brutal life of a gay Gypsy boy forced to defend his family's bare-knuckle fighting title is a gritty, no-apologies account of a colorful, violent subculture.