Peter hasn't seen Ronnie Costello in 53 years, since they played together on their high school baseball team. It has also been 60 years since they attended Belmont Hills Elementary School together. They lived on different sides of Mary Waters Ford Road, the street that, like the Maginot Line, separated the mostly Irish and Italian kids of "The Hill" from the mostly Jewish kids of Penn Valley. There are a lot of stories that each of them could tell (and have) about living on those two sides of the road, and a few years ago Ronnie decided it was time to do just that -- but as a series of imaginative adventure stories under the general title called the On The Hill series. In these books, such as Dead Kids Don't Speak, Insomnia, and The Visitor, the kids that both Ronnie and Peter grew up with back in the day, are now fictional characters (but under their real names) in fabulous action adventures where they go up against the Mafia, Russian spies, and even alien invaders in the 1960's. Think of these books as The Bowery Boys meets The Hardy Boys meets David Lynch, all happening in Belmont Hills.
One thing that Ronnie and Peter had in common as kids is that they both loved the pizzas and cheesesteaks at Mama's Pizzeria. Now, 53 years later, they reconnect in this nostalgic, memory-lane conversation about Ronnie's terrific, action-packed books, while discussing all that has passed since those not so innocent childhood days on "The Hill." They also talk about what it was like reinventing Ron's old friends and family members as fictional characters and placing them into outrageous, roller-coaster-like adventures. As you will see, this conversation brought back a flood of memories for them both as they share their divergent journeys of roads taken, and not taken, to places neither of them thought they would go.
For more about Ronnie's book's, check out his website at https://www.onthehillbooks.com
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