Forsyth Street

About the Book

``No good deed goes unpunished.''

So goes the credo of the slum in which my story, Forsyth Street, is set --- a mainstream novel about coming of age in New York City's Lower East Side during the 1960's. It is the story of Ernest Wentworth, a troubled youth struggling to cope with his parents' alcoholism and his own adolescence.  

The Wentworth children each sense that their family is in free-fall and react to this knowledge in unique ways.  Ernest reaches out --- for the first time --- to the world beyond his family and faces the social interactions he'd always dreaded.  

He falls in love with a brain-damaged, idealistic girl who has a grotesquely tragic past.  And, in the course of this relationship, Ernest learns the meaning of altruism and the need to have hope even when life offers few grounds for it.

The story's conclusion --- at once tragic and inevitable --- begins with a crisis arising from an unexpected quarter.  

About the Author

Justin Smith grew up in New York City and attended the Bronx High School of Science and Hunter College. He currently lives in a suburb of Philadelphia with his wife Brigitte and their two cats, Gus and Walter. When he isn't writing, he enjoys wine-making and doing his ``day job'' as a professor of mathematics and computer science.