Set against the raw, unvarnished backdrop of early-1990s New York and the shadowy institutional hinterlands of New England, Regular Boy is a blistering coming-of-age novel about rebellion, identity, and the thin line between freedom and control.

Raphael is fifteen, sharp, reckless, and too self-aware for his own good—caught between privilege and alienation, punk romanticism and parental expectation. After a summer of raves, drugs, sex, and near-miss catastrophe, he is abruptly extracted from his city life and deposited into a so-called therapeutic boarding school that operates less like a refuge than a psychological pressure cooker. What follows is a harrowing descent into a closed system built on coercion, confession, and conformity, where “self-work” becomes surveillance and belonging is enforced through ritual humiliation.

Blending fever-dream intensity with cultural precision, Michele Civetta captures the volatile inner life of adolescence with uncommon force—its bravado, its cruelty, its longing, and its desperate need for meaning. Regular Boy is at once a portrait of youth culture on the brink of sanitization, an indictment of institutionalized control masquerading as care, and a deeply personal story about a young man struggling to hold onto his sense of self when everything around him demands submission.

Unflinching, lyrical, and emotionally ferocious, Regular Boy announces a powerful new voice and stands as a cautionary tale about what happens when society decides that being “normal” is the highest virtue of all