DANNE

EACH LAUGH — A TRAPDOOR.Everybody calls him Danne. Daniel is for when people are mad at him. You're not there yet.He's eighteen, from Washington Heights, quick enough to talk his way out of almost anything.ALMOST.In one bad week he runs a full therapy session in his psychiatrist's shirt, books his best friend into a fistfight the kid can't win, and drinks whatever his cousin Leo pours in the back room of a club.His grandmother — part bruja, part general — prays for him in Spanish. His father doesn't know his shoe size.Chico reads books. All the way through, which Danne never does. He's two hundred pages into The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.A comic novel about the joke Danne makes at exactly the wrong moment — and what it costs him. Sixty footnotes. One dragon, which is a tattoo he never gets.DANNE is the debut novel from j. a. alba — a comedy about grief, told by a kid who'd rather make you laugh than let you in. He's about to do both.