Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up? is John Powers' classic comic novel of the 1960s Catholic subculture. The book stars Eddie Ryan, a Chicago boy who learns about the important questions of life in his years at an all-boys Catholic school on Chicago’s South Side. Ryan views life through the prism of his Catholic mentality—at times this clarifies life, at times it complicates it, but it always makes life interesting.
