Silver Wolves - by Jerome Charyn (Hardcover)

About the Book

In 1952 Bronx, fifteen-year-old teenage artist and gang member Jonah Salt must choose between loyalty to his gang, the Silver Wolves, and a new life of art, love, and hope.

Book Synopsis

Jonah is a teenager torn between the life of the streets and a life of art and opportunity in 1950s New York City.

The first young adult novel by the award-winning writer of noir and American life who the Los Angeles Times called "Absolutely unique among American writers."

Jonah Salt is incarcerated in a juvenile detention center in the Bronx, after getting busted for burglary and gang activity. His probation officer gets him out and at the behest of his public school teacher, he auditions for and gains admittance to the High School of Music and Art (M&A) for his stunning drawings of wolves, designs he created for his gang, the Silver Wolves. The year is 1952.

While a student at M&A he meets Merle, who is the smartest girl he's ever met. She is a student journalist for the school newspaper and wheelchair-bound, a survivor of polio, which makes her something like an outcast. Their relationship grows, deepens, and becomes romantic. But Jonah Salt is straddling two worlds. What his posh M&A friends don't know is that his dad is institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital. His older brother, Michael, the former leader of the Silver Wolves, is serving twenty years at Castle Billy, a military prison on Governor's Island. And his mother is constantly at work, trying to make ends meet.

Michael's incarceration has left the Silver Wolves vulnerable, and when tensions with other gangs begin to spark, Jonah is tasked with maintaining the peace for everyone in the neighborhood. The duties of his gang life begin to catch up to his new life at M&A, and Jonah needs to make a choice. Will he remain loyal to his second family--his gang? Or will he retreat into the utopia of M&A, his art, and new love? In Silver Wolves, we see a young man make decisions to help those whom he loves the most, no matter the cost.

Review Quotes

"In the mid-1950s, 15-year-old Jonah Salt's life is centered around his older brother Michael's gang, the Silver Wolves.
"But Michael is in prison on Governors Island, their father is institutionalized at a psychiatric center, and Jonah has just been released from juvenile detention. His drawing skills earn him a spot at Harlem Heights' High School of Music and Art, the chance of a lifetime for a boy from the South Bronx. At M & A, Jonah, who's Jewish, is surrounded by the Ivy League-bound elite. The charismatic chair of the English department becomes his ally, and he starts dating Merle Messenger, a bold, academically gifted polio survivor whose disability is handled with care as simply one aspect of her life. Invited into Merle's world of wealth and culture, Jonah must balance new opportunities with what he owes the gang and community. The book paints a meticulous, detailed historical portrait of New York City. Jonah is an observant and principled first-person narrator, but the real stars are the supporting cast members. This young adult debut by acclaimed writer Charyn is populated by lovable, complicated, wholly realized people who inhabit a world that feels full and bustling. The author portrays the complexities of Jonah's life--carceral systems fail him and the people he cares about--but he avoids didacticism, instead offering an almost dreamlike trip that unfolds at a measured pace through the events that shape Jonah into the young man he'll become.
"An immersive and fully realized coming-of-age story."
--Kirkus Revviews (Historical fiction. 14-18)

About the Author

JEROME CHARYN is an award-winning American author. His first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, was published in 1964; and with his eighth novel Blue Eyes (1975), the debut of detective character Isaac Sidel, Charyn attracted wide attention and acclaim. With more than 50 published works, including novels, memoirs, graphic novels, short stories, plays, and creative nonfiction, Charyn has earned a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Two of his memoirs have been named a New York Times Book of the Year, and Charyn has received numerous awards, including a 1983 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in Fiction and a Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Charyn has also been named Commander of Arts and Letters (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Silver Wolves is his first young adult novel.