The kids in this book have been raised by wolves. Wolves who smoke pot. Wolves who turn on, tune out, and the drop out. Hippies who never got over it, but decided to bring kids into the picture. They leave behind children who are emotionally not able to cope with the 21st century. They have grown up with poverty, drugs, poor sexual boundaries and then are cast adrift into a complicated and problematic world.
The book revolves around the lives of four characters: Jude, Teddy, Eliza and Johnny. Jude's father left when he was nine, after telling the young boy that he was adopted. Nice parting shot. Later someone tell shim that he has the physical signs of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, that the 16 year old who gave him up for adopHe left him with his mother, who makes glass bongs for a living. She has some very lax rules about drug use in the house, as you might imagine. Jude's friend Teddy has a mother who is a drunk and a drug addict and leaves town on the day we meet him, which is also the day he dies. Jude and Teddy are best friends, both fifteen and doing every reckless drug they can get hold of— marijuana, cocaine, mushrooms, alcohol, petroleum distillate, turpentine and Freon, which is the one that kills Teddy.
But not before Eliza, the daughter of Jude's father's girlfriend, comes for a visit to their Vermont town on that New Year's Eve and makes love with Teddy in the bathroom of a party house just hours before he dies. And gets pregnant. Which rocks the world of Jude, and Teddy's brother, Johnny. The book is about the dysfunctional way these three teenagers deal with Teddy's death and Eliza's pregnancy, against the dysfunctional way that their parents deal with them, and with their lives in general. Well written and recommended.
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