Son of the Mob
By Gordon Korman

Vince Luca is your basic seventeen year old high school student. His best friend Alex is constantly vicariously trying to score through him with “This is my love life we’re talking about” every time Vince is about to go out on a date. His older brother is a pain. His father has a successful vending machine business. Well, that was the cover up his mother told him when he was little to explain his father’s different working hours from the other fathers in the neighborhood, telling him “you never know when a vending machine is going to break.” It isn’t until Vince is older when he learns his father’s true occupation and what brings in the money that provide a roof over his head, the clothes on his back, and the food in his stomach – Vince’s father is a Mob boss, which explains why Vince has listed sixty plus “uncles” during his youth without knowing exactly how they were related as his father was an only child. Vince wants nothing to do with his father’s “vending machine” business, but, as one could expect, being the son of a Mob boss can put a serious crimp in his dating life; particularly when he begins dating Kendra, who father is the FBI agent who wants more than anything to put Vince’s father in jail. Vince’s voice as he tells the story is full of his wonderfully dry, sarcastic sense of humor which this reader found immensely entertaining and appropriate to the story being told. The pace of the story is quick with something always going on or a new twist about to be discovered. However, the ending, at least to this reader, felt a bit rushed though it did tie together the subplots.