SOURCE: “Fiction.” Kirkus Reviews 47, no. 21 (1 November 1979): 1278.

In the following review, the critic admires the story “The Apprentice” from Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, but unfavorably reviews the collection itself.

Stories and sketches, verismo chunks of muscular Chicago reality: boys bringing a dying immigrant grandmother a jar of outlawed duck's blood soup; tales of ragmen; teenage car escapades; adolescent artists-in-bud; the “basic principle of Catholic education—the Double Reverse: 1) suspect what they teach you; 2) study what they condemn.” Set mostly in poor milieus, Polish or black or Puerto Rican, the sketches generally have a lurid effectiveness just a step or two beyond total believability. But all of Dybek's range and flair works together in the final story, “The Apprentice,” in which a truant boy courses through the city in the constant company of his crazy, ex-taxidermist uncle; together they collect dead-on-the-road animals destined for an imaginary restaurant the uncle claims...