With mordant humor and unsparing honesty, Jeff Charles takes readers through his Midwestern childhood and adolescence across 29 interlocking stories and a range of brutally unforgettable coming-of-age incidents. Featuring a host of indelible characters, as funny as they are pathetic, Cracker Box, Illinois picks up where Jean Shepherd’s In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash left off—only without the sepia-tinted nostalgia.

Just a kid with his eyes and heart wide open to the cruelties and capriciousness of the neighborhood that delimits the boundaries of his world, young Jeff runs afoul of dimwitted bullies, a sadistic dentist, and way too many alcoholic authority figures to count while holding tight to his sense of humor (and some semblance of sanity) in the sacred privacy of his bedroom, thanks to the saving grace of both his colored pencils and his transistor radio. Dodging indignities around every corner, he nevertheless finds joy in his Hot Wheels collection, playing baseball, and a small cadre of friends also doing their level best to survive the suburban insanity. And as he grows up to experience the new befuddlement of inappropriate crushes, aimless nights in the McDonald’s parking lot, and marching band antics gone wrong, he sets his sights on that nearby metropolis—Chicago—in hopes that he’ll escape there one day if it kills him.

A bold new voice of heartland woe, Jeff Charles exposes the trials and tragedies of growing up in a small town lorded over by tiny tyrants with the triumphant spirit of a true survivor.