Open the infamously sensational Sun-Times. Skip the death to Osama pleas and turn to the classifieds. Sandwiched between loan-officers-wanted and steps-to-lake-two-bedrooms you will find column upon fine-printed column of "Notices by Publication," most from the Circuit Court of Cook County's Juvenile Division. Buried in the official text are the names of children set to go into custody of the Court.

Stephen Elliott was one of those kids. His second, largely autobiographical novel, "A Life Without Consequences," approaches his years as a homeless teen in Chicago head-on. Paul, the hero and narrator, leaves home at 13 after his mother dies and his father handcuffs him to a pipe and shaves his head. Paul's subsequent life is a march through Chicago's street scene, particularly the Reed "mental health facility" for runaways and the government's group-home system. We follow him as he struggles to get along, to get out.

"It's definitely the most autobiographical thing I've ever written," Elliott says. "It started as a short story, really—I was living as a sort of ski bum at the time. I'd do my work, some snowboarding, then sit down with a cup of coffee and, yeah, the first few pages just came to me there." And after living "in my car for a while," he says, Elliott landed in San Francisco and finished the book. He now lives, writes and teaches there, having been awarded Stanford's prized 2001 Stegner fellowship.

On the surface, the book bears comparison to the recent street-tough, coming-of-age narrative that is Don De Grazia's "American Skin," but "A Life" comes with a different kind of urgency. "As a kid I was really driven by existence," Elliott says, "and worried that I didn't exist. That's mostly what got me out of the group homes. Because if you allow yourself not to exist, you don't have a chance."

For Elliott, the stakes were high writing this book, sprung from a need to tell about a life engendered in the group homes. "The first option for a ward of the court is foster care," he says. "Then those that are just 'too bad,' those without any advocate, go into the group homes. The most important thing about the book is to raise awareness of the group homes. I don't think many people actually know these places exist."

This book is tough, nearly hard-boiled. It can be read at times as a sort of polemic. But at the same time it is a thing of beauty, narrated artfully and consistently in the present tense. Events roll, energetic and smooth, charging your limbs like a good stiff drink. Paul wiggles sideways around various hurtles: a horrific term in one particular group home shadowed by the Robert Taylor Homes; his continual watch for Charlie, a friend turned North Avenue prostitute. He cops a deal with the principal of a group-home school so that he can go to a normal school (a thing that, Elliott says, "I actually did"). He falls in love, twice, is in the end reunited with a girl he'd long ago assumed imprisoned, or worse.

Paul, much like Elliott, is a success story. The thematic emphasis, however, pulls a counter-punch. Elliott punctuates the book with discursive passages, epiphanic moments in which Paul comprehends, however briefly, his relationship to the outside world, of which the group homes have become just one integral part: "The whole city is planned, immense, and endless. The streets are a perfect grid. Millions and millions of people hide just how well constructed the whole thing is. There's a reason the ten-dollar hookers walk under the Lake Street El lines late at night. They are cheerleaders for the trains. Ten dollars is the perfect price. And it just goes on... "