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Author and pastor Garcia has created a memoir of a boy gone bad melded with the revelations of a young man searching for life’s higher meaning. He is both. His tale begins when he is in solitary confinement in prison, punishment for participation in his street gang’s attack on a law officer. He bears the nickname “Tony Roam,” given to him by his gang mates to denote his apparent inability to escape his life of crime and poverty. What can he do in this depressing atmosphere? He pulls up memories from his childhood as the son of a loving, hardworking Puerto Rican mother and his early upbringing in an urban New Jersey slum. He recalls hearing as a small child that his beloved father was dead, with no details given by his grief-stricken mother.
Since the overcrowded schools were taught in English, the Spanish-speaking boy felt further alienated, joining a gang in his early teens. He remembers all his fellow gangsters, their group loyalty, their scams and petty crimes, and their pushback against other groups. Adding to his challenges, he suffered unpredictable spells of epilepsy, which were a factor in his solitary confinement since the spells often occurred when he was awakening from sleep, sometimes resulting in eerie behaviors. But occasionally, as he reflects upon it in his confinement, they offered him etheric, strongly spiritual visions. Tony’s many hours of recollection, depression, and self-abnegation were gradually intermixed with a growing sense of strength in a relationship with God and Jesus, acquired as he read the only book available to him—the Holy Bible.
With the writing skills that Garcia acquired determinedly in his admirable zeal to share with others his early misadventures and later rise to self-respect, he dramatically presents a lively, action-packed story of street life, a poignantly lonely portrait of prison life, and an inspiring journal of genuine connection to the life of Jesus and the words of the early Christian prophets. He was raised in the Catholic faith, but because of his difficult circumstances, he was unable to dedicate himself as strongly as he might have wished to religious belief. The young man’s lengthy trawling of scripture in absolute solitude provided a growing sense that God was with him. He vividly recounts spiritual visions, which, together with his newfound attraction to biblical wisdom and guidance, would provide a life-renewing prescription.
In maturity, Garcia became a street pastor. He has devoted himself to preventing others like his former self from making the same mistakes that led to his imprisonment and regret, declaring, “For as long as I live, I will never forget my gang brothers.” He devotes the book’s concluding segments to his street ministry and open-minded sharing with local churches. Each chapter concludes with appropriate biblical verses chosen to resound with the events evoked by the mental explorations of Tony Roam, the youthful lawbreaker who longed for a better path and found it, as Garcia makes plain, through single-minded study and divine oversight. Garcia’s work can inspire others facing Tony’s dilemmas, inviting them to follow the spiritual path he has chosen.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review