Why watch the movie when you can read the book? The blurb says it all: "Forgive me father, for I am 14." Chris Fuhrman's The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys is a bittersweet coming-of-age story involving a group of altar boys, who are inveterate pranksters in school.The book makes an interesting read because the story is told from the point of view of a 14-year old kid. He notices a lot of details about things and talks about his fears, his hopes, his insecurities, which brought back memories. Not that I had hernia, or fell in love with this girl who slept with her own brother, or regularly shoplifted from the grocery store, or created a comic book depicting priests and nuns doing it on the church altar, or conspired to drug a bobcat and set it loose in school as a diversion. The book has no big plot. It's more like a month in the lives of four kids growing up. What makes the book interesting is how the story is told.
Too bad it has a sad ending. In their last caper as gangsters, one of the boys got bitten by a bobcat on the neck and DOA'ed when they got to the hospital.
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