The Milk Chicken Bomb
By (Author) Andrew Wedderburn
Coach House Books
Coach House Books
15th July 2007
Canada
General
Fiction
FIC
Paperback
96
Width 127mm, Height 203mm
425g
The kid sells lemonade. Not a lot of people buy lemonade, especially now that its winter, but the kid makes good lemonade, even if his friend Mullen thinks it ought to be sweeter.
They dont talk much with the other ten-year-olds most of the others are Dead Kids anyway. Except for Jenny Tierney, but shes busy breaking kids faces with her math book. Besides, the Russians from the meat-packing plant are a lot cooler, and they always win at curling.
But in small-town Alberta, there are just too many roman-candle fights, bonspiels, retaliatory river diversions, black-market submarines, exploding boilers, meat-packing-plant suicides and recess-time lightning strikes for one lonely kid to get any attention. He might as well go to Kazakhstan. Then the adults in his life start disappearing down tunnels and into rendering vats. Being ten is hard enough without all that, especially when your best friend is ruining the lemonade.
But the Milk Chicken Bomb should change everything.
Frenetic, hilarious and gently heartrending, The Milk Chicken Bomb takes us inside the mind of a troubled ten-year-old who is just beginning to understand that the adults around him are as lonely and bewildered as he is in the face of the slapstick demands of the world.
Andrew Wedderburn has worked in community radio and at cooperative bookstores, slung martinis, and was briefly a moderately successful Name That Tune host. Now he explains stock photography for a living. His rock and roll outfit, Hot Little Rocket, has played all the way across Canada more times than he can keep track of and performed for two weeks straight in Beijing in 2005. The Milk Chicken Bomb is his first novel. He lives in Calgary, Alberta.