Revere Beach Boulevard

This book represents the best of both worlds: a suspenseful novel that is better than "Mystic River" and an eloquent, beautifully crafted piece of literature. Merullo's skill at telling the story clearly, while going back and forth among different characters' points of view yet still moving the plot forward is masterful!

I did not want this book to end. I was engaged with each of the characters as if they were my own family. Muerllo's descriptions of sights, sounds, and feelings allowed me to get lost in the places and with the people he was describing. I can't wait for the next two books of this Trilogy to appear. I grew up in Marblehead and Revere Beach was forbidden to us as nice WASP girls, so of course we went there whenever we could in the 50's and 60's. How wonderful to see it brought to life by one of the best craftsman I have ever read.

While I'm rarely drawn to novels about the underworld (I'm the only person in the U.S. who hasn't seen The Godfather!), I somehow chose this book over another on a vacation trip to the bookstore a few months ago. What a serendipitous find -- truly believable characters in a milieu that has been done to death in the pop media. The main character, Peter, is a likable sort who has slipped over the line and can't find his way back. His supportive and confused parents are of the rock-solid generation that we too often take for granted, both as parents and neighbors. The tenderness between them despite their own differences is extraordinary. The multiple-points-of-view manner of telling the story is handled masterfully; not for a second do you wonder who is speaking, so distinct is each character. Well done, Mr. Merullo. I look forward to the 2nd and 3rd parts of this trilogy with much anticipation. Don't keep me waiting too long!

Revere Beach Boulevard is my favorite book of 1998. I think everyone can relate to one or more of the characters and some how find yourself thinking about them even after you've put the book down for the night.The book was written in first person narrative for each character. Its amazing how you begin to identify each character after only a few words .

This is a wonderful book. The authenticity of this world is perfectly rendered, and this rendition is in the voice, the characters, and most of all in the author's unrelenting love for this world and these characters. Revere Beach Boulevard is one of those books that has been so perfectly realized by its author that the reader feels privileged to have been this intimate with a world he does not know. Surely, this sense of privilege is one of the things that makes this book so successful. It has a verisimilitude that is uncanny. Of course the character of the gambler is the best of what is a number of successes, and this is so because not only is the pleasure of gambling, the beauty and attraction of it made real, but the workings of the man's mind are so perfectly revealed as to be something we are watching, something that we know, rather than something we are reading. The book is exciting, from the point of view of ordinary story telling, and then the gangsters seem to be appallingly real, too. In trying to praise a book like this, one immediately runs up against the fact that the vocabulary of praise is so run down, or just so overused that it is difficult to say, in any succinct manner, how great an accomplishment this book really is. But it is all those things one usually says, brilliant, compelling, moving, true, inspired, and, of course, the work of a great talent fully in control of a subject.