The Clancys of Queens

July 25, 2016
Clancy’s debut, an intimate coming-of-age chronicle, captures the circumstances of her multi-class upbringing as the neighborhood “rat” of the Broad Channel section of Queens, N.Y.; a part-time member of “the Geriatrics of 251st Street”; and a weekender at the upscale seaside community of Bridgehampton. The reader navigates through this lighthearted memoir with the help of a sharp-tongued, hip-hop-loving sneaker enthusiast whose relentless attempts at disrupting the tranquility of nearly every situation make up the bulk of the antics covered in the book’s 21-year sprawl. The rest come from an eclectic cast of friends and family that include Grandma Rosalie Riccobono, an Italian-American matriarch whose colorful curses serve as her everyday punctuation; Rosemary, a self-described “rebellious, alcoholic, soon-to-be-heroin-addict, giant butch built of tough Rockaway Irish stock”; and the regulars at Gregory’s Bar and Restaurant, the nautical-themed neighborhood watering hole. Set against the grunge and rap backdrop of the late 1980s and early ’90s Queens, the heart of Clancy’s thoroughly enjoyable narrative lies in her examination of life in the spaces between social classes, and the threads of humanity shared equally by the local pothead high schoolers, antique-collecting Hamptons businessmen, and the Irish-American cops of New York City.