Showing results for "The Kid" in Coming of Age

When Khloe Devaro's best friend and fiance is lost to the war in Iraq, she's beyond distraught. Her intentions of joining him in the afterlife are thwarted by a Cerberus Motorcycle Club member. Too young to do anything on her own, the only alternative she has now is to take Kid up on his offer to stay at the MC clubhouse. As if that's not a disaster waiting to happen, but anything is better than returning to the foster home she's been forced to live in the last three years.

A little deer walks into the wolf’s den. I want answers. I know nothing of love, family, or stability, having been raised in the foster system and spat out at eighteen, pregnant, and with no memory of how that came to be. I try to find my estranged father, a man rumoured to be in the Mafia, hopeful he will use his influence to discover what really happened the night someone took my innocence. But I don’t find my father. I walk straight into the den of his associate, the Don of the Cosa Nostra.

In A Kid from Marlboro Road, past and present intermingle as family stories are told and retold. The narrative careens between the prior generation’s colorful sojourns in the Bronx and Hell’s Kitchen and the softer world of Gibson, the town on Long Island where they live now. There are scenes in the Rockaways, at Belmont racetrack, and in Montauk. Edward Burns’s buoyant first novel is a bildungsroman, yet out of one boy’s story a collective warmth emerges, a certain kind of American tale, raucous and joyous.

Ali Rain: Sometimes I think to myself, "How did I get here?" Then the pain hits and I remember...it's because she's gone. I now live in a new town, go to a new school, and I'm supposed to be moving on with my new life. Only, I no longer know who I am anymore. Dancing is all I have left and every day I feel completely alone. Silence has become the theme song to my life. She said to find some joy and light, but I don't know how. Mostly, I feel surrounded in darkness...that is, until I meet him.