a YA series.

Volume 1: Billy Bello's Dog Days

A YA series that addresses head on today’s issues of teenage drug use, sex and violence. This upbeat, positive-looking work offers wise, often funny, sane alternatives to many teens' modern-day anxieties.

Volume 1 of this series is a short novel. 100 pgs. 18,000 words.

Synopsis:

This volume’s plot revolves around his beloved dog, Fritz. A neighbor poisons her. She survives. Though Billy puts a leash on her, she is continually kicked by the doctor who has an office downstairs. Billy makes the wrong decision of attempting to rob the doctor of his precious art collection. He’s caught, arrested and goes to jail. What happens next can be found at the conclusion in Judge Brenda’s courtroom.

Billy Bellow’s world consists of strange friends, magic, vindictive elders. Drugs and crime. At the same time, his world is often wondrous. What it’s like to fly like a bird. Ride a bike on his head. Kiss a girl for hours:
"I hold the Bensonhurst record for the longest kiss. I kissed Maryanne in a dark closet for one hour and forty minutes straight. No messing around, just a kiss. I breathed through my nose. Kept to her lips like crazy glue. When, gasping for air, she tried to pull away, I signaled to her with my eyes to breathe through her nose like me. I figured she wouldn’t mind kissing me that long."

contact:
Anthony Valerio
avalerio@wesleyan.edu