Welcome to Marvin, Alberta, the fictional landscape of writer/musician Andrew Wedderburn’s debut novel. Starring “the kid,” an unnamed narrator who stands against the backdrop of the local meat-packing plant, amid Russian expatriates, smalltown antiheroes, bonspiels, and black-market submarine scandals, this is the story of one boy’s Alberta childhood and the no-man’s land between the world of children and adults. Oh, and it’s about lemonade, too. Lots and lots of lemonade. Sound strange? Well, it is. But such is the charm of The Milk Chicken Bomb.

The book chronicles the reality of a 10-year-old boy, detailing both the extraordinary and the banal. The narrator’s universe is a complex hierarchy of good guys and bad guys with names like Mullen, Deke Howitz, the Ant People, the Glue Men, and the Dead Kids. Throughout the story, Wedderburn’s characters have a distinct familiarity, right down to their ratty DOA T-shirts and red-mesh ballcaps. The voice of the kid, too, sticks like glue: “Days I can’t find Mullen I like to walk over to the gully and throw rocks. There’s this grocery cart in the gully I like to throw rocks at. Rattles real good when you hit it.”

Wedderburn’s prose has an alluringly musical style, with descriptions of lemon seeds that “are tricky like that, they know that everybody hates them, so they try to sneak up on people” and visceral descriptions of characters like old man McClaghan, whose “hack and plop of old-man spit” can be heard up the street.

Right up until the end, Wedderburn teases us with red herrings and unresolved questions. What, exactly, is the milk chicken bomb? And why does the kid keep running away from home? It would have been nice to have received a few more clues. But Wedderburn leaves it up to us to devise our stories and figure out our own answers, adding to the book’s overall charm and mystique.