Kid of Arcadia

Eleven-year-old Jared Gallagher suffers sexual abuse at the hands of someone close to him in the summer of 1981. It's a shame he struggles to keep hidden. That same summer he is reunited with his long-estranged father and six-year-old half-brother Eliot. Finding himself in the role of big brother all of a sudden while trying to hide the incident of his abuse causes him to unleash his own frustrations on the younger boy and soon threatens to tear the new family apart. So Jared has to make the choice between accepting his part in this cycle of trauma or running from it. But he won't accept it, so this fragile adolescent prepares to make a run that will take him farther out from his toubled suburban life than he's ever been, into danger he's never before known, and toward a kind of redemption he's never before felt. KID OF ARCADIA is Mark Charron's first novel. He is also the author of a book of poetry called Poems from the Sprawl, and currently resides in New England.