To young Sam Joseph, suburban Chicago in the mid 1960s was alive with kids who played all day and returned home at the first flicker of the street lights. The neighborhood was filled with marauding bands of kids everywhere, inventing games, establishing rules, and administering justice. Growing up in the company of his friends gave Sam the freedom to define his identity and discover his unique path to adulthood. Home Avenue is a comic novel about growing up at the end of the baby boom, a time when parents were miraculously uninvolved in the minute-by-minute governing of childhood. This collection of stories reads like a novel and offers an insight into the animating power of this particular time, and of Chicago itself.