The stories in We Grew Here comprise a vibrant mosaic of Oakland, all grounded through the lens of the Greek immigrant community. Apollo Papafrangou is an energetic and observant writer who creates passionate characters out here working and hustling their art. This is a love letter to The Town, its people, its history, heart, and humor.

We Grew Here is a sly, quirky, and entertaining journey through a cool Oakland landscape of strivers and dreamers.

With poetic and passionate prose, Apollo Papafrangou takes us on a universal, coming-of-age journey that stretches from America’s Pacific Coast to a tiny beachside village in Greece. Wings of Wax is a deeply moving and entertaining story about a father and son and the sea that divides them. Papafrangou perfectly captures the loneliness, confusion, and fears of young adulthood and the desires we all possess at our core—to be comfortable in our own skin, to find a place we fit in the world, to have wings like Icarus and soar through the sky without worrying that the sun will melt them away.

We Grew Here thoughtfully engages questions of authenticity, identity, race, gentrification, and what it means to make a life. Through art, through work, through love and frienships and local community, these vivid characters are not only searching but also learning the art of being and belonging. There’s a tender masculinity here, both funny and poignant, and these lucid, linked stories explore the ways place, language, and landscape shape us, and the ways we shape them in return. Papafrangou crafts a loving, lively portrait of Oakland—its joys, its tensions, its complexities—and of those who call it home.

In ‘the coming of age’ novel Wings of Wax, Papafrangou expresses, through detailed character development and description, the beauty of Angelo’s psychological journey, as well as his physical one through Greece; the land of his heritage. An enjoyable book full of life and comic relief.

A beautifully written book with an endearing narrator who flies us into the vortex of Greekness, first in America and then in crisis–ridden Greece. A candid story that tackles identity, kinship and love, and full of good humor: sharp-witted relatives, and smooth operators with worry beads. This could be the hot ‘Greek’ novel of the year!