What accounts for the precarious state of liberalism in the mid 1980s? Why was the Republican Party able to steal away so many ethnic Democrats of modest means in recent presidential elections? Jonathan Rieder explores these questions in his powerful study of the Jews and Italians of Canarsie, a middle-income community that was once the scene of a wild insurgency against racial busing. Proud bootstrappers, the children of immigrants, Canarsians may speak with piquant New York accents, but their story has a more universal appeal. Canarsie is Middle America, Brooklyn-style.

What accounts for the precarious state of liberalism in recent decades? Jonathan Rieder explores this question in his powerful study of the Jews and Italians of Canarsie, a middle-income community in New York that was once the scene of a wild insurgency against racial busing.

Everything in fourteen-year-old Allie Canarsie's life has gone wrong until she finds meaning investigating the circumstances behind a young boy's unexpected death. The new town, Nickel Park, where Allie has moved with her mother is a big disappointment. The rented trailer where they live now is cramped and depressing. School is a place to waste time and get in trouble, and friends are nonexistent. Worst of all, she has not heard from her father since he walked out on the family. Feeling cut off from those around her, Allie finds herself drawn to the funerals of strangers. Here among the black-clad, sad-eyed anonymous mourners she feels a sense of belonging. But Allie's strange new hobby takes an ominous turn when she becomes preoccupied with the death—and former life—of an adolescent boy named Jimmy Muller. Soon she becomes entangled in the lives of Jimmy's best friend Dennis and Mr. Muller, the dead boy's father. Allie's determination to prove that Jimmy's death was no accident sets into a motion a chain of events that forever alters her life. As she solves the troubling puzzle of Jimmy's death, she finds some surprising answers to questions in her own life. In this provocative and affecting novel for young adults, author Susan Heyboer O'Keefe gives voice to adolescent expressions of isolation and confusion that will resonate with young readers.