As Jimi Hendrix and Vietnam rumble on in the background, an Italian-American teenage boy grows up working in his dad's gas station in Massachusetts. In a world full of rear end fluid, floor jacks and leaky gaskets, the narrator is awkward with his father and not too hot at mounting snow tires or dismantling engines. Poetic, poignant, and beautifully observed -- the grease and grime of the gas station, the rhythms of work and talk, are detailed with such precision that the locality becomes universal -- Joseph Torra has written an extraordinary and superb coming-of-age novel in the great American blue-collar tradition, and one which has echoes of another working-class son of Massachusetts, Jack Kerouac.