EDGEWATER ANGELS

Toomer, the precocious narrator of this likable first novel, is a young adolescent in the San Pedro section of L.A., where gang violence is a given, absentee fathers are preferred to the live-in kind who get "so so mad" and futures are bleak. The sense of community is strong, however; as the novel begins, gang warfare has ceased so the neighborhood can present a unified front to the LAPD, or "rollers." Toomer narrates in the first-person plural, speaking for a generation of ghetto kids who have cobbled together a community based on something other than violence. Meallet, who grew up in San Pedro, reproduces the infectious slang of southern California youth, characterized by the invention of amalgamated adjectives: "a you-guys-are-sorry gigglesound." His prose is swift-paced and conversational, but the series of disjunctive subplots—the wonder of a first car, forays into petty crime, the revelation of sexual secrets by a friend's father, a fantastical narrative about Toomer's own missing father—disrupt the arc of the narrative, making this feel like a series of short stories forced into novel form. The book is a portrait of the artist as a young thug, and despite Toomer's communal voice, the escape from ghetto life (implied and made true by Meallet's own success) appears to be an individual one, based on Toomer's clandestine interest in classical music and secret forays to the local library. Nothing detracts from the punch of the ending, in which Toomer and his buddies give an anonymous homeless man a funeral and help a wounded woman give birth, acts of kindness giving truth to the anonymous man's dying words: "How wonderful you've become... like angels." Agent, Leigh Feldman.(On sale, July 17)