Welcome To Starstruck

Under a gray Long Island sky, a coughing pickup holds a son waiting for the story. StarStruck opens like a memory and reads like a making. Thomas James D’Aguanno’s debut is a confident origin tale, treating late-1990s kids’ parties as work, cash, and status.

The novel moves between two places. In the present, mid-forties Jake talks to his six-year-old son Thomas in the pickup. In the 1990s, he works at StarStruck Events, Rosa’s strip-mall party company. Teenage Jake, new to Massapequa, has hunger, pride, and a gift for holding a room. A Motorola StarTAC at the park and Rosa’s rules at the strip mall pull him into the work. D’Aguanno draws on his own years in Long Island children’s entertainment. He stays with the crew and the floor, where the real question is who owns the room. The plot stays inside that world. Under the glitter of the parties, a working kid is learning how to become the Prince of Pequa.

D’Aguanno writes close to the skin. You feel the sweat in the costume and the bass at the fairground. Grit and shine share the same sentence. The nineties songs stay in the background and serve Jake’s grind. The dialogue is sharp and local. The truck is the book’s finest turn. Thomas’s questions open the past, and the reader sits in the cab while a father shapes work, music, and nerve into a name worth handing down.

Start with this volume. Book 1 is already sure of its ground, and it offers the making of the Prince of Pequa with heat, craft, and heart. Readers who want a working-class origin, a live party floor, and a father talking to his son will find StarStruck ready to recommend, and ready to read.