Uncle Janice

October 13, 2014
The uncle of the title of this gripping, well-written book set on the mean streets of contemporary Queens is an undercover narcotics officer in the NYPD. “Uncle” Janice Itwaru, a New Yorker of Guyanese descent, poses as a drug addict to make “buys” of crack and other controlled substances; she is shadowed by a “ghost,” a fellow officer who makes the arrests. Burgess has crafted an urban picaresque, though Itwaru’s undercover identity and activities are potentially dangerous. But the relatively low level of narrative momentum (this is not a genre novel) is well compensated for by the rich, vibrant portrait of Queens’s vast underclass—from the suffering addicts and smalltime dealers to the cops who are more concerned with doing their job, surviving the tedium and drudgery, and moving their way up the NYPD food chain than making the streets safer from the scourge of drugs. Burgess (Dogfight, a Love Story) has a finely honed eye and a gift for rendering street-smart dialogue that is both credible and comic; he fully realizes Itwaru’s world and makes the reader understand just how futile most of the skirmishes in the war on drugs really are.

February 2, 2015
The heroine of Burgess’s novel is 24-year-old Janice Itwaru, an “uncle”—NYPD slang for undercover narc—just a month shy of getting her detective shield. The promotion won’t be easy. Working the mean streets of Queens circa 2008—dealing with pushers, pimps, and addicts—is not the best way to stay alive. Then there are her backbiting fellow uncles, her Alzheimer-suffering mother, and a probable Internal Affairs investigation to worry about. What’s an ambitious, fiercely dedicated cop to do? Make a plan. This richly detailed account of a young policewoman’s life on the streets is given a narration by Fulginiti that is the perfect complement to Burgess’s authentic dialogue and realistic portraits of cops at work and play. She catches Janice’s shifting attitudes, as the hapless character stumbles from near disasters to moments of self-satisfaction and elation, and she creates a multitude of voices for the book’s large cast of characters—slow-talking dopers, suspicious dealers, macho “uncles,” demanding and unfeeling big bosses. Fulginiti uses a range of accents, and she does so with enough subtlety to avoid complaints of stereotyping. A Doubleday hardcover.

This tragi-comedy features 24-year-old New York City undercover narcotics cop Janice Itwaru. She's set her sights on making enough arrests in 18 months to get promoted. Narrator Rachel Fulginiti is clearly talented, but she has too much pep in her voice when the going gets grim or gritty. Despite the promotional promise that the book is "uproariously funny," it's not light laughs. In fact, the story is difficult to categorize, sometimes dark and sometimes funny. A listener can sympathize with the challenge Fulginiti faced when deciding how to approach the narration, but the result is still, at times, a bit off-key. G.S.D. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine