Too often, stories about the inner-city poor either lionize or demonize their subjects, turning them into tragic emblems of the inequities of American society, or holding them up as the causes as well as the sources of street violence. Sandro Meallet's debut novel Edgewater Angels is a rarity, a book about slum life that burdens its protagonists with few value judgments while offering up virtually no moral messages. The first-person narrator, 12-year-old Sunny Toomer, takes most events in his California housing project as purely a matter of course, and reports them casually in a somewhat awkward gutter patois in which meaningful words jumble up in random order, or slide together in hyphenated clumps or messy compounds. ("I mean, why couldn't our made-it-out-of-Dodge-with-style freedomfeel be the same as the one a bird could know while on its smooth soaring fly through the sky?") Toomer is capable of affection, bewilderment, terror, and anger, but all these emotions are fleeting in an environment where he periodically ducks bullets in his own living room, watches his uncles mutilate a hitchhiker who flipped them the bird, charts the undercurrents of violence and tension among the local gangs, and listens eagerly to lectures from a friend's father about how he should dump any woman who won't go for non-baby-producing "compromise" sexual acts. Angels is as episodic as a short-story anthology, though themes of sudden violence, irresponsible or dangerous father figures, and coming-of-age tribulations run throughout the book. Certainly some stories are stronger than others; the final two, which concern birth and death, score fairly high on the schlockometer, while some of the more casual tales, which aren't weighted down with heavy symbolism, breeze past in a welter of colorful language and mesmerizingly focused narrative. Meallet grew up in the slum he's describing, but while his familiarity with violence comes across as flawlessly authentic, his stories don't possess the immediacy or rawness of an adult biography. Toomer's idiom, his experiences, and his curious mixture of worldliness and naiveté come together to form something almost like an urban fairy tale in spite of all its realism. Edgewater Angels is an anecdotal report from the front, but it wasn't written in a familiar gritty-and-grim war-correspondent way. It's more like the report of an astronaut gone native, languidly treading on an alien planet where most visitors wouldn't survive.