Amp'd

June 20, 2016
Two-time Emmy nominee Pisani's debut novel tells the heartbreakingly hilarious and quirky story of Aaron, whose life is derailed after a bad car accident that leads to the amputation of his left arm. Not that he was really winning the game of life anyway: before the accident all he had was a failed marriage and an unrewarding teaching job. Now, with no one to take care of him, Aaron holes up in his dad's attic in Paris, Ill., concocts cocktails of painkillers and medical marijuana, and attempts to abdicate from life, hoping to somehow avoid the way people treat him now that he's an amputee. He'll even go so far as to escape through a bathroom window if it means eluding the stares. Even as he continues to protest and make lists of all the things he can't do with only one arm, life keeps finding him in the form of an alligator, a boisterous kid with cancer, a job counting fish, an alluring radio personality, and another amputee. With lighthearted brevity and wit, Pisani manages to pull Aaron and his ragtag crew of friends and family through dark timesâgrief, depression, hopelessness, death, and even extinctionâin the most entertaining and ridiculous ways.

Starred review from March 1, 2016
When 40-something high school teacher Aaron loses his left arm in a car accident, he has a chance to overcome adversity and become a better man. But he'd rather pop a few Vicodin and smoke a joint. Soon after regaining consciousness in his hospital room, the one-armed antihero of Pisani's acerbic debut novel repeatedly invokes the memory of real-life computer science professor Randy Pausch, who delivered "The Last Lecture" to his students at Carnegie Mellon University after learning that he had terminal pancreatic cancer. The professor's inspirational call to achieve one's childhood dreams quickly went viral on YouTube. When Aaron becomes an Internet sensation, it's because his low-life brother-in-law posts footage of the teacher's stump, newly tattooed to resemble a sea serpent. As Aaron recovers from his accident, he tries to regain his emotional and physical balance as he bunks with his divorced father and works as a fish counter at the local dam. All the while, Aaron nurses a healthy addiction to prescription pills and medical marijuana. (The names of the weed strains are nothing short of fantastic.) Never succumbing to the temptation to become treacly or sentimental, the story slowly evolves into one of brilliant cynical insight and raw tenderness as Aaron befriends a cast of misfits, including a foulmouthed 11-year-old cancer patient and a morally ambiguous fellow amputee. Pisani always stays on the right side of the line when introducing quirky elements, like his cougar mom, who lives in a yurt with her firefighting boyfriend, and a love interest Aaron knows only as a voice that broadcasts scientific tidbits on the local radio station. Complete with painfully wry observations and delightfully caustic wit, this novel is a gritty exploration of what it's like to feel incomplete in the world. All five fingers up for this bitterly satisfying tale.

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February 15, 2016
Pisani's recent experience as a writer in the fickle world of television entertainment serves him well in this alternately poignant and wryly funny first novel about a man trying to wrest some meaning from his life after becoming disabled. After an SUV rams into the side of his car, leaving him bereft of his left arm, Aaron, a high-school teacher, retreats to the Paris, Illinois, home of his father, a retired and emotionally distant hoarder who refuses to acknowledge his son's affliction. Between doses of V2 (his term for Vicodin chased by Valium) and brooding about his sudden outcast status (his first-person narrative is peppered with lists of things you can't do with one arm), Aaron finds some meager pleasure in swooning over the alluring voice of a radio science commentator named Sunny Lee and landing a job as a local dam fish counter. Together with his protagonist's barbed observations on contemporary life, Pisani's portrait of a disabled man self-deprecatingly embracing his own brokenness is oddly compelling and understatedly comical.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)