The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

Megastar Jonny Valentine, eleven-year-old icon of bubblegum pop, knows deep down that the fans don’t love him for who he is. The talented singer’s image, voice, and even hairdo have been relentlessly packaged - by his L.A. label and his hard-partying manager-mother, Jane - into bite-size pabulum, sliding down the gullet of mass culture. But inside the marketing machine, somewhere, Jonny is still a vulnerable little boy, perplexed by his budding sexuality and his heartthrob status, dependent on Jane, and endlessly searching for the father who abandoned him, in Internet fan sites, lonely emails, and the crowds of countless, faceless fans.

Set inside the corporate arenas and luxury hotel suites of the prepubescent crooner’s Valentine Days cross-country tour, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine offers a slyly scathing indictment of celebrity and consumer culture, and the ways each of us is complicit in Jonny’s world. Trapped in a prison he’s been told is paradise, Jonny seems to embody everything that’s wrong with our society - but he is both its cause and its victim.

Poignant, brilliant, and viciously funny, told through the eyes of one of the most unforgettable child narrators since Holden Caulfield, this literary masterpiece explores with devastating insight and empathy the underbelly of success in twenty-first-century America. The Love Song of Jonny Valentine is a tour de force by a standout voice of his generation.