We walked along some railroad tracks that gave us a straight shot from Sunshine to Walgreen's. There's something about walking on the tracks that's very different from a regular old sidewalk. We never really thought about it, but whenever we could, we always chose the tracks over walking along the side of some road -- And that was a great, almost beautiful thing, on our way to a shoplifting spree with cold Cokes in our hands and cigarettes in our months that all our parents would have killed us for, blue sky and train tracks as far as we could see.Daniel Grey Marshall's bracing literary debut traces a journey from innocence to experience, from childhood through the crushing rebirth of adolescence into an early yet hard-won adulthood. At its center is Jim, a Midwestern teen who finds a home with friends just as his family is disappointing him; who finds distraction and solace and escape in a maelstrom of cheap drugs and alcohol; who discovers beauty through the eyes of a girl named Leslie, his extraordinary friend and lover. A succession of desperate events from suicide to armed robbery -- conspires to destroy the world Jim has carved out with his friends; his own loss of control is precipitous, heartrending, and inevitable. Yet throughout the novel -- and even to its searing final scenes -- Jim's intensely human voice lends the story a bright and luminous soul.