American literature is rich with stories about gifted young boys who don't fit the mold: Tom Sawyer, Nick Adams, Holden Caulfield, Alex Portnoy and many others. And now Monroe Katz brings us his alter - ego Norman, a troubled boy growing up poor and Jewish in the streets of Brooklyn, New York.
Norman stutters miserably, blinks incessantly, wets his bed, and lives under the constant verbal whipping of his Aunt Manya. To fend off the harsh realities of his world, Norman develops a rich interior life and holds fast to the most cherished lifeline he has: his dreams of becoming an artist. Every day, he draws from memory portraits of family, neighbors and friends - only to have Aunt Manya destroy every one of them. His mother is dead, his father is a deadbeat, and Norman's future looks extremely bleak, until he is visited by a most unusual friend, Rembrandt van Rijn.
This is a novel of heartbreak and challenge, misery and triumph, as Norman takes us along on his journey from Brooklyn to the U.S. naval shipyard in Vallejo California and then the fertile landscapes of the Napa Valley.