GARBAGE TOWN

A group of teens stumbles across a criminal enterprise centered around their neighborhood dump in Gupta’s debut YA novel.

Staten Island, 1998: The neighborhood of Travis is home to Fresh Kills Landfill, the main dumping ground for New York City’s trash—among other things. For kids like Raj Patel, it’s a spot to be avoided, a place “of luminescent rivers, dog-sized rats, and rabid turkey vultures,” to say nothing of its connections to the local mafia family. Raj has enough on his plate without worrying about Fresh Kills—the high schooler runs his own lucrative business burning bootleg CDs for his classmates. He uses the money to help out his Polish American mom, who’s been forced to pull double shifts as a nurse’s aide at an eldercare facility ever since his Indian father split for Florida two years ago. On the night following his final day of freshman year, Raj, a new Mississippi transplant named Georgia, and Raj’s friends—known throughout the neighborhood as the Victory Boys—accidentally stumble across a murder-in-progress in the middle of the landfill. They manage to disrupt the proceedings (sort of), but now they have mobsters on their tails. If they want to get out of this quagmire with their lives, Raj and his buddies will have to confront the long-ignored garbage rotting in the heart of their town. Gupta evokes the time and place with sharp details and plenty of wit, particularly regarding the dump itself. “My science teacher never tired of reminding us that the only man-made structures visible from space were the Great Wall of China and the Fresh Kills landfill,” narrates Raj. “As far as we were concerned, those two were comparable—monuments to humanity’s limitless potential.” While the premise of a group of teens uncovering a mystery is well-trod territory, Gupta delivers on both sides of the equation: Raj and his friends—who include a pair of stoners called Deadbolt and Cheetah—are charmingly specific and memorably rendered, as is Travis’s multiethnic underworld.

An immersive teen adventure as big and eclectic as a Staten Island landfill.