The story takes place in 1971. It tells the story of Dominick Pindle, a fifteen-year- old boy, who lives in Holedo, Massachusetts with his parents, who seem like a normal couple but really hold a lot of personal secrets. Dominick's father tends to drink a lot. Often Dominick and his mother must find him and drag him out of bars. His father has a mistress named Edie, who Dominick meets one night while searching for his father. Dominick feels sorry for her plight and loans her thousands of dollars that belongs to his mother, causing even more problems. Dominick longs for a normal family. His mother has told him of a brother that he has never seen that she had with her first husband and supposedly lives with Dominick's uncle Donald. The search of course goes majorly wrong and Dominick learns secrets that would have been better off staying buried, makes discussions that nearly cost him his life and the life of an innocent baby.

It wasn't exactly what I expected from the book description...not a lot of mystery but the story will make you angry, make you cheer It will tease you with hope and taunt you with despair. Best of all it will keep you cheering for a 15 year old boy who learned more than he should have about life and love. ( )

Slow in pace, I almost gave this the 50 page rule. I'm glad I hung in there and ended up reading the book in one sitting.

It was not unusual for fifteen year old Dominick Pindle to drive each night with his mother and her girlfriend as they searched for his father's car, and, finding him at a bar, Dominick always was the one who went inside and begged Daddy to come home.

However, it was unusual when Dominick's mother found his father's car parked in a woman's driveway instead of a bar. Retrieving his father from beautiful divorced Edie set Dominick on a life changing path. This one event sent ripples of destruction for many involved.

Dominick fell in love/lust with much older Edie. Using him for emotional support, and as a way to understand his father, Edie teased and manipulated young Dominick. Soon, learning that she was pregnant with his father's child, Dominick stole his mother's emergency fund money from a compartment in her bedroom and gave $8,000 to Edie.

Refusing to abort the baby, Edie was beaten by Dominick's father and left on her own to deal with the situation. Using Edie's stolen money, she paid her debts and left town.

Concurrently, learning that his father is once again missing in action, Dominick tried to console his distraught mother. Torn between his immature feelings toward Edie, and the pity and love that he feels for his mother, he burns with anger toward his father.

Their apartment is cold, and his mother, who is accustomed to his father's frequent abandonment, seems to be much more upset than usual.

Alone and desperate, Dominick's mother dies from a self induced abortion. Finding his mother dead in a local hotel, in a pool of blood, Dominick learns that his mother was also pregnant. And, if he would not have stolen her money, she would have used it to obtain a safe abortion somewhere outside of the United States.

Conceived as a result of loneliness, Edie's mother longed for affection and had an affair with a local policeman, Dominick's mother also was abandoned by the father of the child who originally helped induce the abortion, but left her when it was obvious things were going wrong.

To appease his guilt, Dominick took drastic measures. Running away from home, on a quest to confront Edie with her selfishness, and to rescue his baby sister, after days went by, the headlines now state that he is "The Boy Still Missing."

This is a complicated story, and at the hands of a less talented author, it would have been a soap opera disaster. Instead, the writing is crisp and the characters so wonderfully developed, that it is indeed very much worth the time and energy spent to finish.

At times convoluted and difficult to follow, one of the leading statements that shines through is that of women's rights to chose. At a time when abortions were illegal, Dominick's mother would have lived if she had the choice to abort her baby in a safe, sterile environment. ( )

Teenaged Dominick Pindle is the sole scion of a dysfunctional family in a Massachusetts small town: his father spends all his time boozing and fornicating while his mother tries to keep up a pretense of normalcy, even though many an evening must be spent cruising the local bars in search of hubby. Dad gets really serious about one of his mistresses, Edie, although the affair falls violently apart when Edie becomes pregnant — which is not before Dominick has met her and fallen violently in lust with her. Once Dad's out of the picture, and once it's clear Edie intends to have the baby anyway, she and Dominick enter a curious relationship that psychologically has a sexual foundation even though physically there's no sex involved. What is involved is theft, however: Edie needs money to get her through her pregnancy and set herself up in a new life in New York, and an infatuated Dominick lends it to her from his mother's hidden stashes of cash at home — her life savings.

But then there comes a time when his mother needs that money, and of course it isn't there. Out of the consequent disaster Dominick emerges intent on revenge against Edie, for disappearing without repaying the dough, and against his never-met stepbrother, illegally adopted by a wealthy family and now too snotty to acknowledge his real parentage.

But very little is truly as Dominick believes it to be. By the time the story's over he's discovered the love of his life and also his own adult self.

I have very mixed feelings about this book. Some of the writing is enormously self-indulgent, and should have received the attention of an editor. (Consider this partial piece of scene-setting for a wake: "On the kitchen table they had set out platters of food. Eggs with yolks whipped fluffy, sprinkled with a blood-colored spice. Lunch meats curled into finger-sized slices, fleshy and damp. Hard squares of cheese, orange as the sun . . ." And it goes on, laden with useful information for readers who've forgotten the color of American cheese.) I found myself frequently filled with a mixture of irritation and boredom, and yet at the same time it was an indubitable fact that the pages kept turning. I really did become involved with Dominick and Jeannie, the wonderful girlfriend he's lucky enough to be acquired by (Searles handles particularly well the way that it takes Dominick a while to realize just quite how fortunate he is), and I was pressing ahead urgently to make sure that they both came out of the ever-broadening mess okay. On balance, then, the book was a success so far as this humble reader was concerned; but I did feel I'd been forced to work far harder than I should have had to in order to reach the payoff. ( )

This is one of the best books I have read in quite some time. It is a coming-of-age story, yet so much more. Dominick is a 15 year old boy who has to face some tough realities, life decisions, and a tough quest for his future. All of the characters are so well written that the reader feels they get to know each and everyone. Searles states that most of his friends are females and it is obvious in the fact that his female characters are dead on. This book is a rollercoaster ride for your emotions. It seems like Dominick's choice to ultimately do a good deed and help his mother, leads him down a road which is filled with heartache and dispare. His move into adulthood is not paved with an easy path. Fabulous read... ( )