Set in Savannah, Georgia, in the early 1970s, this is a novel of youth, its anarchic joy, and its first encounters with the concerns and apprehensions of early adulthood. Francis Doyle, Tim Sullivan, and their three closest friends are altar boys at Blessed Heart Catholic Church and eight-grade classmates at the parish school. They are also inveterate pranksters, suburban Tom Saywers.

Bright, artistic, and unimpressed by adult authority, they are sworn to subvert the world that their parents and teachers have made for them.

Trouble at school presents the opportunity for their crowning escapade - for a chance to move beyond broken streetlights, playground brawls, and shoplifted junk food. They had barely finished drawing Sodom vs. Gomorrah '74 - a collaborative comic book depicting Blessed Heart's nuns and priests gleefully breaking the seventh commandment - when it fell into the hands of the principal. Certain that their parents will be informed, the boys conspire to create a diversion and buy some time.

Their plan is to capture a dangerous wild animal and set it loose in the school.

It is a scheme too audacious to abandon, one that will seal their friendships forever. Woven into the details of the boys' preparations for the stunt are author Chris Fuhrman's touching, hilarious renderings of the daily routines of the school day and the initiatory rites of male adolescence, from the first serious kiss to the first serious hangover.

Fuhrman also displays his ear for the continual banter of schoolboys, employing its luridly detailed put-downs, exaggerated boasts, and aimless speculations as a backdrop against which the story's main events take place. His descriptions of the boys' lives at home, of their self-absorbed or abusive parents, are rendered discerningly as well.

Without moralizing, Fuhrman conveys the notion so central to his story: precocity and idealism aside, the main motivation for the boys to band together is that they find in one another the comfort, support, and approval that are missing at home.

In the end, a turn of fate puts more distance between the boys and the comic-book incident than they had ever planned or wanted, and mortality, not adult authority, becomes the enemy against which they must plot. So right in its details of a particular place, time, and state of mind, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys will reawaken its readers' memories of their own precarious passage out of childhood.