Yonkers Beats: A Discussion Guide has been released is to address the controversial issues in Patricia Vaccarino’s Yonkers Trilogy. The guide is intended for use by teachers, book clubs—or anyone who wants—to examine controversial topics that engender difficult conversations.
Ms. Vaccarino’s coming-of-age historical novels take us on a dark journey encountering racism, sexual harassment, abortion, homophobia, mental illness, organized crime, violence, death, lost love, and lost friendship among the working class and poor. Although the Yonkers Trilogy covers the time from 1969 to 1973, the issues prevalent then are the same issues that we grapple with today.
Vaccarino said, “I want people to understand the Yonkers working-class culture, circa 1969-1973. I’m very proud of capturing this place and time in history. I want people to learn the nuances of Yonkers culture in the same way Edna O’Brien depicted Ireland during the 1960s and Willa Cather conjured the Great Plains in the mid Nineteenth Century. The Yonkers Trilogy establishes a time and place in New York history that will never come again.”
Published by small imprint Modus Operandi Books, the Yonkers Trilogy is a crossover to both Young Adult and Adult historical literary fiction. So Not Yonkers, the third book in the Yonkers Trilogy, was published earlier this year on May 1, 2023. The two prior books in the Yonkers trilogy are The Heart of Yonkers (2020) and YONKERS Yonkers!: A Story of Race and Redemption (2018).
Ms. Vaccarino has also written a monograph about the circumstances that led to the razing of the Yonkers Carnegie Library in 1982. The Death of a Library: An American Tragedy is available in softcover, hardcover and as an eBook.
Yonkers Beats: A Discussion Guide is available on Amazon in print and as an ebook.