5★
Among other things, this is literally a coming-of-age story, with Weed Clapper on the verge of turning 18, which is of-age when you’re sending kids to war.

I thoroughly enjoyed this. Weed (nickname) is a funny, sarcastic, troubled kid whose parents and adored little brother were killed in a car crash. Not “lost” because he knows where they are. He reminds me of Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye, except I never cared as much about Holden as I care about Weed.

We meet him as he’s getting ready to move from the city of Scranton, PA to his grandmother Ollie’s home in rural Indiana and its cornfields.

There’s a factory near town:

“When the corn is cooking, the air in town turns a dreary brown. You can taste the odor. It smells like infected feet. I’ll never be able to face a bowl of corn flakes again without thinking of plantar warts.”

BLECH!

Weed is a marvellous mixture of inexperienced kid, hormone-driven teen, and sensitive young man who has been pummelled by life and trying to deal with it from all those perspectives. To top it off, he limps badly from some unexplained (until much later) leg injury and seems to think people judge him by his disability.

At his new school, he’s a city slicker (reckons he looks a bit like Elvis) who helps one of the nerdy kids become cool by coaching him in how to fix his hair and clothes.

He maintains a heartfelt and amusing correspondence with his old hometown buddies, and they share war stories and worries. They've been pals forever and they're all finishing high school. One is black, one is Jewish (studious and set for college and has been told "to get himself some good shoes because Jews are destined to wander the earth forever" ).

Weed is very bright and interested in literature, but he gets so riled up about things, that he ditches school a lot. He’s extremely fond of a very young teacher, Laura, who kind of adopts him and lends him books.

She’s going with some ne’er-do-well (Weed doesn’t like him and neither do we), and she is also being stalked by a veteran who returned home as a physically and mentally damaged shell of his former self, while his best friend died. Weed is repelled by him but feels terrible that he has this reaction to a wounded soldier, especially considering his own bad leg.

There’s plenty of death and serious stuff, and there’s adult romance, a pregnancy, gossip and mystery, but there’s also funny teen-aged angst. When back in Scranton, he and his Jewish friend Murray, (the one with top grades) decided the Catholics had it all figured out with confession.

“So Murray and I decided to confess to each other in my dad’s tool shed. We even swiped some pop-beads from Murray’s mother to ensure proper procedure. Unfortunately, there are certain nocturnal habits a guy can’t even confess to his best friend, if you get my drift. So somehow that spring, the sex and God thing got all mixed up.

Then learn about gays “guys who prefer ‘same-sex'. Murray reckoned that ‘same-sex’ must refer to when a guy rubs himself for his own perverted pleasure, so I knew then I was doomed.”

Later he says things like: “After I same-sexed myself . . ."

Funny kid. Meanwhile, in Indiana, he bumps up hard against racial prejudice when he begins casually befriending some local blacks. He can’t believe people seriously worry about skin colour. To someone who's happy to 'hire' blacks but not mingle, he says:

“Aren’t you afraid people will think you’re a laundry lady, the way you go to such trouble to separate colors from whites?”

When a would-be girlfriend warns he will be thought to be low-class for associating with blacks (Negros, colored people in the book), he says:

“Low-class? And this comes from the parents who told you Hyannis Port is a liquor?”

There’s a local farmer who flies a helicopter in spite of suffering from narcolepsy, sudden sleep attacks that occur at ‘inconvenient’ times, a black family who sort of adopt him, the local drugstore owner who feeds him ice cream, and his grandmother, the delightful Ollie, a retired ‘exotic dancer’, no less. And she still dresses to impress.

“It was the shoes that really killed me. You know those sexy shoes with high heels and no backs that make a guy think dirty thoughts? Well, Ollie’s clodhoppers were wedged into a pair of those, her meaty hooves rupturing over the edges so that she resembled a giant roast beef served up on two Yorkshire pudding popovers. I was speechless.”

After some local tragic meetings with the KKK and still suffering with nightmares about his little brother, he is miserable and thinks about the flies he’s seen stuck on fly strips.

“We’re all struggling like helpless insects. We’d be better off if God would just put us out of our misery with one hefty swat. At least it would be merciful. Maybe a guy has to do everything himself.”

I was completely absorbed by Weed’s story and his friends and their stories. It’s not all fun and games, but it’s very real.

Thanks to NetGalley and Waldorf Publishing for the preview copy from which I've quoted, (so the quotes could have changed). I just loved it! Great for all ages.