The author sends ten-dollar words to do ten-cent jobs, and his vocabulary sometimes exceeds his comprehension (he should check the definition of soupçon). Usage and grammatical errors include dangling constructions and inappropriate pronoun cases.

The tone throughout is ironic and playful, but often overwrought as well.

His reminiscences include the obligatory sexual coming-of-age stuff, some of it sordid he renders the almost equally obligatory drug-deal-gone-bad sequence in screenplay format. When he finally contacted his mother’s family, he learned she had died. After much difficulty, Matthews began to take his life more seriously, obtaining a GED and attending college. He attached himself to the neighborhood stud, whose father taught martial arts and kept firearms around the house. He stumbled through elementary school, dropped out of high school, watched a lot of TV, read a lot of books. The author easily passed for white through much of his childhood and youth, telling the curious-and there were many-that he was Jewish, Lebanese, Palestinian, whatever they would believe. The ensuing years featured deepening poverty, declining fortunes and an abusive stepmother who stabbed David with a fork and put his head through drywall. Ralph Matthews “stole” his son from his estranged wife, who promptly decamped for Israel, never to return.

Matthews, whose father worked for a variety of black publications in Baltimore, shows remarkable energy and imagination, as well as appealing self-deprecation, in his tale of success erected on a foundation of failure. Debut memoir relates the author’s struggles with a mixed-race identity, his family’s battles with poverty and his search for a profoundly schizophrenic mother who disappeared during his infancy.

Ace of spades novel