Ah, summer. If you're an adolescent, it is that sweet, yet trepidatious, in-between time the last school year and the next. Love is ominous, yet sought. So much physical growth occurs it is almost missed until you go shopping, or until a gossipy aunt points it out, you know who I mean.

It also is the time that separates the wheat from the chaff, or the rich from the poor, when it comes to family vacations. Those with money on the East Coast, travel to the Vineyard or Long Island. Those families without stay in New York City amid the smoldering concrete canyons and jagged skyline.

In 'Sag Harbor,' Colson Whitehead, the Pulitzer Prize finalist of 'John Henry Days,' spins a masterful coming-of-age story set in 1985 about Benji Cooper and his younger brother, Reggie, who summer in Sag Harbor, Long Island, where a small community of African American professionals has created a world of their own.

"When did you get out?'' or "How long you out for?'' Those are questions used to determine how long one plans to stay in town for the summer. They sound like questions posed to an ex-con, but Whitehead uses them as a metaphorical play on words to highlight that Sag Harbor is anything but prison-like. In the excerpt below, he illustrates the importance of the answer.

"The magic answer was Through Labor Day or the Whole Summer,'' Whitehead writes. " Anything less was to signal misfortune. Out for the weekend at the start of season, to open up the house, sweep cracks, that was okay. But only coming out for a month? A week? What was wrong, were you having financial difficulties?''

Benji, 15, the protagonist, is a bit of a nerd who spends the school year going to the roller-disco bar mitzvahs, playing Dungeons and Dragons and trying to check out naked girls on late-night cable television and reading monster magazines. He and Reggie, 14, born 10 months apart, recently "ceased to be twins,'' when they became a matched set.

"Joined not at the hip or spleen or nervous system but at that more important place-that spot on your self where you meet the world,'' Whitehead writes. "There was something in the human DNA that compelled people to say 'Benji 'n' Reggie, Benji 'n' Reggie in a singsong way, as if we were cartoon characters or mascots or some twenty-five cent candy.''

'Sag Harbor' is uproariously funny as it moves from Memorial Day to Labor Day in a tale whose characters and setting will remain with you long after you put the book down.