The Milk Chicken Bomb

by Andrew Wedderburn

The kid sells lemonade. Not a lot of people buy lemonade, especially now that it’s winter, but the kid makes good lemonade, even if his friend Mullen thinks it ought to be sweeter.
They don’t talk much with the other ten-year-olds — most of the others are Dead Kids anyway. Except for Jenny Tierney, but she’s 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

(From Publisher).

Andrew Wedderburn has worked in community radio and co-operative bookstores, slung martinis and was briefly a moderately successful Name That Tune host. Now he explains stock photography for a living. His rock’n’roll outfit, Hot Little Rocket, has played across Canada more times than he can keep track of and performed for two weeks in Beijing in 2005. The Milk Chicken Bomb is his first novel. He lives in Calgary.

In small town Alberta the ten year old narrator of this story, known only as "the kid", spends time with his friend Mullen hanging out and selling lemonade. They soon realize that shady things are happening in town such as strange disappearances and the discovery of underground tunnels. The boys carry on their wild adventures and prepare to save the day with their mythical milk chicken bomb.