The Night Bird Cantata Hardcover - 1998

From the publisher

In his debut novel, Rawley has woven his lush prose into a beautiful -- and devastating -- coming-of-age story about an effeminate 10-year-old white boy and the black maid who befriends him.

Abandoned without warning by his self-involved mother and cruel grandmother, 10-year-old L.P., an effeminate only child, is sent off to spend a magical summer in the care of Betty his grandmother's maid, in black South Phoenix. A former jazz singer at war with inner demons of her own, Betty is the only adult in L.P.'s small universe who has a place in her heart for the troubled boy, offering him a friendship born of shared pain, and the dazzle and wonder of his childhood's end. In this singular season of fever dreams, betrayals, loss and rude sexual awakening, L.P. will struggle to find a space for himself in a world that does not want him. And in the end, he will have learned many things about the fragile masks adults hide behind and weapons they use to wound, setting him free for flight, like the unseen night birds singing in the dark.
-- A gay coming-of-age story that is completely fresh and distinctive, The Night Bird Cantata has the power of Michael Cunningham's A Home at the End of the World or Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina.-- First serial rights to American Short Fiction.

"Brutally gorgeous, triumphantly lyrical, and unmistakably brilliant. Donald Rawley makes myth of our contemporary lives". -- Kate Braverman, author of Squandering the Blue