A teenager’s idyllic summer of freedom is shaded by the growing weight of responsibility and a recognition of the fallibility of the adults around him.

Actor and director Ed Burns returns with the continuing fictionalized saga of growing up on Marlboro Road.

In this his second Marlboro Road novel, Edward Burns continues the tale, loosely based on his own childhood. The Guardian called Burns’s first novel, A Kid from Marlboro Road, “keenly felt … vivid … a tender-hearted complement to the Irish-American stories that Burns captures in his films.” The boy that was twelve in the first novel is now fourteen, about to turn fifteen, when he will enter an all-boys Catholic High School. He spends a lot more time with his best friends, Mark, T-Mac, Zeppo, Louie and Cakes than he does with his given family.

But for all their newfound freedom, the kids find the larger world of Valley Stream and the neighboring towns a more dangerous place than they’re prepared for, where dads can hurt you when they reveal their own emotional scars and the local beach might be ruled by gangs of older kids you might have to defend yourself from. In this larger world our narrator starts to see even his own family as not so perfect.

The Marlboro Road Gang is a novel where darker currents start to invade the innocent pastorale of childhood, and where a boy might lose his bearings in the confusion.