The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

by Teddy Wayne

Genres: Coming of Age

Synopsis

For fans of A Visit from the Goon Squad and Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde, here is a scathing and enthralling new novel about America’s monstrous obsession with fame from the winner of a 2011 Whiting Writers’ Award.

Megastar Jonny Valentine, eleven-year-old icon of bubblegum pop, knows that the fans don’t love him for who he is. His image, his voice, and even his hairdo have been packaged—by his LA label and by his hard-partying manager-mother—into bite-size pieces for easy digestion, sliding down the gullet of mass culture, the biggest appeal to the widest demographic. But somewhere inside the relentless marketing machine is still a little boy, devoted to his mother and determined to find his absent father among the countless, faceless fans—isn’t there?

A twisted, brilliant, and viciously funny coming-of-age story set inside corporate arenas and luxury hotel suites, Teddy Wayne’s The Love Song of Jonny Valentine explores with devastating clarity the underbelly of fame in twenty-first-century America’s celebrity culture, told through the eyes of one of the most unforgettable child narrators since Holden Caulfield. This novel is a literary masterpiece from the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of Kapitoil—one of the standout writers of his generation.

Publisher: Free Press

Print pages: 304