The Crazyladies of Pearl Street

A Novel

By: Trevanian

Narrated by: Leonardo Leoncavallo

Legendary writer Trevanian brings readers his most personal novel yet: a funny, deeply felt, often touching coming-of-age novel set in 1930s America.

Six-year-old Jean-Luc LaPointe, his little sister, and his spirited but vulnerable young mother have been abandoned—again—by his father, a charming con artist. With no money and nowhere else to go, the LaPointes create a fragile nest in a tenement building at 238 North Pearl Street in Albany, New York.

For the next eight years, through the Great Depression and Second World War, they live in the heart of the Irish slum, surrounded by ward heelers, unemployment, and grinding poverty. Pearl Street is also home to a variety of “crazyladies”: Miss Cox, the feared and ridiculed teacher who ignites Jean-Luc’s imagination; Mrs. Kane, who runs a beauty parlor/fortune-telling salon in the back of her husband’s grocery store; Mrs. Meehan, the desperate, harried matriarch of a thuggish family across the street; lonely Mrs. McGivney, who spends every day tending to her catatonic husband, a veteran of the Great War; and Jean-Luc’s own unconventional, vivacious mother. Colorful though it is, Jean-Luc never stops dreaming of a way out of the slum, and his mother’s impossible expectations are both his driving force and his burden.

As legendary writer Trevanian lovingly re-creates the neighborhood of his youth in this funny, deeply moving coming-of-age novel, he also paints a vivid portrait of a neighborhood, a city, a nation in turmoil, and the people waiting for a better life to begin. It’s a heartfelt and unforgettable look back at one child’s life in the 1930s and ’40s, a story that will be remembered long after the last page is turned.©2005 Trevanian; (P)2005 Books on Tape, Inc

Critic reviews

“Nostalgic, richly textured. Sweetly evokes an innocent if hardscrabble lost age.” —Publishers Weekly

“Literary time travel, meticulously remembered and set down. . . . This book is in some ways a key to our country; America was made by people like this.” —Washington Post

Fabulous walk down history!

The reader was fantastic!!! Since I have lived in the albany area since 1986, this book was a lovely walk through Albany’s history, people and architecture. Highly recommend!

Fetching Title but Repetitive

The book is a 10 in parts and a 1 in other parts. This seems like a delightful short story stretched into a novel.

A walk down memory lane

I have never read anything else by this author so I was skeptical about this book but it was delightful. It is rich in "signs of the time" and the reality of a child's imagination that is trying to cope with pressures and guilt, most of it self-imposed out of a sense of responsibility. Trevanian has captured the essence of growing up in poverty in a small city. I found so many things that related to my own childhood that at times I could still feel the burden and I think the only escape was to develop a rich imagination. I hated the story to end. A lot of books written about this time frame are written from a rural setting and we see how hard it is to run the farm or make a living from the land - this gives an urban view from the eyes of an intelligent ambitious young boy.

Trevanian delivers

Exquisitely written. This book really puts you in the heart of the Great Depression. His characters are very detailed and you feel as if you intimately know each one particularly Jean Lucas.

A novel? I don't think so.

What a lovely walk down memory lane! An Honest Lullaby indeed. and how delightful to learn, after the fact, that it was more memoir than novel.