At the centre of the filmmaker Edward Burns’s hearty though rudimentary tale A Kid from Marlboro Road is an Irish family living in New York in the 1970s. The story is narrated by Kneeney, a teenager who dodges nasty nuns and a grandmother’s attempt to line him up for the priesthood. An assignment to pen a poem for school sparks his literary ambitions. 

A Kid from Marlboro Road is a bildungs­roman featuring all the typical ‘firsts’ – first pint, first cigarette – but the protagonist’s mother (‘biddy’, in the novel’s parlance) cannot bear to see her ‘little Kneeney’ enter adulthood. Determined not to be ‘the last momma’s boy on Marlboro Road’, our narrator gets to work cutting the apron strings, puffing and typewriting his way to freedom. 

Although we’re introduced to older Irish characters (in both senses of the word), such as Pop McSweeney, whose wake at the beginning of the novel overshadows the rest of the narrative, the adolescent narrator’s perspective is the only one the reader is given. The vocabulary is therefore limited: Kneeney