Concetta "Cookie" Colangelo is almost 17 and an adult her whole life, to hear her tell it. Now she is almost out of high school, working nights and weekends, and wishing for a way out of her blue-collar suburb, tantalizingly close to New York City. When the fortune telling machine's prediction seemingly comes true, Cookie and a couple of hundred grand in purloined cash are so outta there. Soon she is ensconced in a new life in the glittering world of the1970s New York art scene, a world in which old friends are abandoned and new friends are just out to use you, a world that is so not Yonkers. So Not Yonkers, the third in Patricia Vaccarino's Yonkers novels featuring Cookie Colangelo, offers watercolor word portraits of a small city in decline, as seen through the eyes of a wiser-than-her-years protagonist, combined with the grit of a Martin Scorsese mobster movie.