Street Boys [Large Print] [Hardcover]

Lorenzo Carcaterra (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 2002

A gang of street urchins and an American soldier fight to liberate the city of Naples from the German army Naples, late September, 1943. The war in Europe is almost won. Italy is leaderless; Mussolini already arrested by anti-fascists. The city has been evacuated, but the German army is moving towards Naples to finish the job. Their chilling instructions are: if the city can't belong to Hitler, it will belong to no one. No one but the children. Orphaned or hidden by parents, abandoned or lost, some as young as ten years old, the children of Naples resist. Aided by a lone Allied soldier, cut off from his regiment, and armed with just a handful of guns, unexploded bombs and their own ingenuity, the street boys are determined to take on the advancing enemy and save the city - or die trying.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Here is proof that when there's a film deal in the works, publishers will snap up the book and promote it as a literary event. Carcaterra, who landed on the big screen with his New York Times bestseller Sleepers, builds his flimsy tale around a Neapolitan legend describing a 1943 skirmish between armored German occupation forces and local street urchins. In doing so, he draws inspiration from a host of sources ranging from The Secret of Santa Vittoria to Saving Private Ryan. Steve Connors, an American commando cut off from his unit, joins forces with a group of Neapolitan slum children orphaned by the war. The one-dimensional characters and their names could have been taken from a war comic: there is the dutiful Nazi named Von Klaus, who knows that Germany will lose the war, but is determined to follow his orders no matter what; Nunzia, the love interest; even a faithful mastiff who stays by Connorss side throughout. The amateurish writing, especially the dialogue (The Nazis have destroyed Naples, but they have not destroyed us) seems formatted for quick and easy screen adaptation, weaving cookie-cutter moments together in picturesquely ravaged locales. The reader can almost hear the director shouting, Cue Panzers! ClichE-addled, unconvincing and loaded with ridiculous throwaway lines, this novel will need all the help it can get from the film version.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

In World War II Naples, homeless children take on the advancing Germans single-handedly, with just a few primitive weapons and the help of a stranded American G.I. Soon to be a major motion picture.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 536 pages
• Publisher: Thorndike Press (December 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786248637
• ISBN-13: 978-0786248636
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,607,560 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Four-day screenplay, May 21, 2003

By 

Peter Lorenzi (Maryland, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Street Boys (Hardcover)

Let's recognize some basics: In September 1943, a small number of people, most of them young orphans, fought a pitched street battle with German tanks and soliders in the dying days of the war in Naples. Quattro Giornate is an historic event; "Street Boys" is not. Some will say the book reads better as a screenplay; the Italians already made the movie, forty years ago. Books need to be copy edited for spelling, accuracy and consistency; "Street Boys" is missing some of this. Some want the book to be truer to the history or at least more realistic; "Street Boys" has battle scenes that read like a cross among "Saving Private Ryan", "The Little Rascals", and the Hardy Boys.

Enter 'Quattro Giornate' along with 'Napoli' and '1943' in a Google search and you can find enough history to judge the relative accuracy of this book. If you're looking for historical accuracy, this book is not it. Men and women were more of a presence in the battle; the Germans were not the pathetic, Keystone Cops portrayed in the book. Naples was crushed, literally and figuratively, by petty, evil, vengeful Germans, but not without a fight, however small and however late.

The characters are cardboard. Picture Colin Farrell as the one-man American army. Select any llithesome, nubile, dark-haired, olive skinned starlet du jour to play Nunzia. Or a young Leonard DiCaprio as the partisan child leader, Vincenzo. But the scenery and weather are pretty, no matter how much desolation brought on by the war. The events are heroic and ripe for Hollywood over-the-top scenes, e.g., menancing Germans shot by amazingly accurate fire from untrained youths at the last second.

"Street Boys" could be a whole lot better. The story deserves better. But I would not dismiss this book, if only because the basic story should be remembered and writing your own screenplay in your head from a mediocre book is a much better exercise then watching a bad or even mediocre movie.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Cliched, formulaic, awful, November 17, 2003

By 

Bruce Burns (Columbus, Ohio United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Street Boys (Mass Market Paperback)

I kept thinking, while I was reading Street Boys, that this book is a terrible insult to the actual street fighters who held off the nazis and their panzers in the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland, only to be lost in the end.

The author, to compound the error, makes every action scene uninteresting and unbelievable, and every emotional scene (death and love) devoid of emotion. Episodes of dying children are smarmy or corny, or both at once. Children outsmart and overwhelm seasoned soldiers who have far superior firepower at every turn.

Even the most egregious mistakes supposedly made by the Germans would not have enabled outnumbered and overmatched children to destroy a panzer division and hundreds of enemy troops, along with a German tanker.

I hope no one buys this book. I hope no one pays to see the movie. I hope people read Mila 18 by Leon Uris instead.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Very disappointing--desperately searching 2nd movie deal, June 17, 2003

By 

Moore (Atlanta, GA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Street Boys (Hardcover)

This is the third Carcaterra book that I have read (Sleepers, Apaches) and by far the worst. The scenes in this book are so unbelievable, I found myself stressed about finishing the final 1/3 of the book. There is a stead-fast rule in this book: If a character has a name, he/she is probably not going to die. I feel Carcaterra realized this in coming to the end of writing, so he kills off several characters in a matter of pages.

I also feel that Carcaterra remembered that he introduced the idea of conspiracy from the other street boys in the late rounds of writing and realized that he had to kill their leader before moving forward.

Overall, I would not recommend this book to anyone. I regretfully picked this book up in an airport bookstore based on my past experience with Carcaterra novels. This will be my last based on the fact that I felt he was whoring his writing out and begging for a movie deal with his latest work.