Regular Boy - by Michele Civetta (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Set against the raw, unvarnished backdrop of early-1990s New York and the shadowy institutional hinterlands of New England, Regular Boy is a blistering coming-of-age novel about rebellion, identity, and the thin line between freedom and control.

Raphael is fifteen, sharp, reckless, and too self-aware for his own good--caught between privilege and alienation, punk romanticism and parental expectation. After a summer of raves, drugs, sex, and near-miss catastrophe, he is abruptly extracted from his city life and deposited into a so-called therapeutic boarding school that operates less like a refuge than a psychological pressure cooker. What follows is a harrowing descent into a closed system built on coercion, confession, and conformity, where "self-work" becomes surveillance and belonging is enforced through ritual humiliation.

Blending fever-dream intensity with cultural precision, Michele Civetta captures the volatile inner life of adolescence with uncommon force--its bravado, its cruelty, its longing, and its desperate need for meaning. Regular Boy is at once a portrait of youth culture on the brink of sanitization, an indictment of institutionalized control masquerading as care, and a deeply personal story about a young man struggling to hold onto his sense of self when everything around him demands submission.

Unflinching, lyrical, and emotionally ferocious, Regular Boy announces a powerful new voice and stands as a cautionary tale about what happens when society decides that being "normal" is the highest virtue of all

Review Quotes

"Mr. Civetta has carved out a career on the threshold of art and commerce subverting form and content in a post modern blitzkrieg of imagery and representational meta-narratives."-- "Italian Cultural Institute in New York"

About the Author

Michele Civetta is a New York-based writer, filmmaker, and artist whose work spans fiction, directing, and screenwriting. Across mediums, his work examines adolescence, desire, rebellion, and the systems that govern behavior--from family to institutions. Informed by lived experience and late-20th-century counterculture, his storytelling combines visual immediacy with unflinching psychological depth. Regular Boy is his debut novel.