this classic yet contemporary Inbildungsroman (coming-of-age novel), Tawni O'Dell implicitly includes a great deal of social commentary in a novel that seems, on the surface, to be the poetic, sarcastic, and often comic musings and rantings of a boy becoming a man amid the pressure, tension, and fatigue forced on him by the fact that his mother is serving a life sentence for the murder of his father.

The protagonist is nineteen-year-old Harley Altmyer, who is trying to take care of his three younger sisters, and O'Dell's choice to write from the point of view of this emotionally disturbed teenager offers her opportunities to deepen the effect of her fiction by using all the forms of irony, especially dramatic irony, wherein the audience knows what the character does not know.

Thus, Harley, even with all his faults, becomes a sympathetic character with whom the audience can...