From Publishers Weekly
Heartbreaking yet hilarious, this posthumous novel set in Savannah, Ga., in the 1970s chronicles a school year in the life of narrator Francis Doyle, an eighth-grader at the parish school of the Blessed Heart. Though the plot turns on the youthful pranks of Francis's gang, Fuhrman brings to his characters a near-adult consciousness as rites of passage like the first kiss are interwoven with imaginative acts of adolescent revolt and moments of terrible family life. Francis, soulful and suffering from a hernia, is beaten regularly by his father and turns to drink. He falls in love with Margie--a delicate, off-balance girl with a "wrist fragile as a swan's throat," who attempted suicide the year before--and longs for her with a sensual need that is captivating. When Francis first sees her, in church, the touching, love-at-first-sight moment is juxtaposed with the slapstick antics of a dog, with "tags clinking," who urinates against the altar. By marrying the earnest to the ridiculous, Fuhrman captures the sublime intensity of adolescence. But the novel expands beyond first-rate character studies as Francis and his friends struggle against the racial prejudice that saturates their school and neighborhood and threatens to explode into a race riot when a black schoolmate breaks a duck's wing with a baseball bat. Fuhrman (1960-1991) died of cancer while working on the final revision of this book--his first and last, which can be compared to many of the classic coming-of-age novels. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
On the cusp of adolescence, some 13-year-old boys band together, swigging the Sacrament wine behind their priests' backs and drawing illicit comic books depicting nuns and priests engaged in--you guessed it--sex. This fictional memoir of a Catholic boyhood concentrates on the coming-of-age of its narrator, Francis, who a year before the book begins, at 12, attempted suicide. No wonder, considering the dark underside of punitive Catholicism that Francis' story puts generously on display, not least in the figure of the boy's father, who literally beats his son bloody for not eating scorched corned beef. Francis' mother looks on horror-struck and cowed; afterward she is helpless except for the salve she administers. As Francis blunders through his first sexual encounter with a much more experienced girl, gets himself muddy and bloody in school-yard fights with his buddies, and eventually faces the frailty of human life, this darkly comic work by an author who died young well before its publication takes on an increasingly savage tone full of foreboding, grief, and very Catholic reparation. Whitney Scott


From Kirkus Reviews
A light tale of rebellious eighth graders set in a Savannah Catholic junior high school in 1974, written by a young Georgian who died of cancer as he was completing this, his only novel. Francis Doyle is part of a ``gang'' of fellow classmates and altar boys who are from troubled homes and are all too smart and too creative for their conservative school. Besides stealing from their parents' liquor cabinets and experimenting with pot, the gang rebels by creating blasphemous comic books. They're led by the undersized Tim O'Brien, who furthers everyone's education with banned books like William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Since they are about to graduate, the young outlaws come up with what they consider a fitting farewell, Sodom vs. Gomorrah '74, an epic comic book that shows the nuns and priests of Blessed Heart in wicked embraces. When the book is found by one of the priests, the gang is threatened with expulsion. Tim suggests that if they do something really drastic, say kidnapping a bobcat from a local nature preserve and releasing it in the school, the priests would forget about their relatively minor indiscretion. Complicating matters for Francis is that he has fallen in love for the first time, with a seventh grader with an equally turbulent past. But Francis goes along with his buddies as they try to capture a bobcat, with predictably tragic results. Fuhrman is especially successful in capturing the awkwardness of first love and the fierce, blind loyalties of pubescent boys. Despite these moments, little sustains the novel besides the young-adult plot and a simple theme of ``authority is bad.'' The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys shows that Fuhrman had much promise, and it is unfortunate that we will never have the joy of seeing his talents bloom. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER