By being told in the first person in a chronological but episodic fashion, the seven stories effectively illustrate the egocentric nature of adolescence. Instead of following the natural time-cycle of the agricultural prairies—the periods of seeding, growing, and harvesting—Eric's self-focused time frame is very much limited to the present and the immediate future. Consequently, from a reader's perspective, but likely not Eric's, there are many gaps in what he shares with his audience. For instance, in the opening story, "The Clodhopper's Halloween Ball," Eric reports that his girlfriend, Anna-Maria, asks, "I wonder what will happen to us, don't you." It is not until the fourth story that readers get an answer to Anna-Maria's almost rhetorical question: "She'd been my first and only girlfriend, and she'd dumped me three months ago for my ex-friend Peter." Not only is this one sentence all readers...