It's 1976, and on the first day of eighth grade, Hollis Calhoun is flushing Robert Carter's head down the school's toilet. Enter new boy Nathan Tilly, and the scene changes as a friendship forms. Robert and Nathan bring out the best in each other just long enough to cope with the deaths of Nathan's father and Robert's brother. Despite the tragedies, readers won't feel weighed down. Like the kites Nathan sets free, the prose soars as the author tackles first loves, best friends, and clever acts of revenge. George employs a style similar to that of Jean Shepherd (author of A Christmas Story), conjuring up a run-down amusement park, a man with a toe for a thumb, a dead mongoose, a chain-smoking dragon, and more. Also included are an oddly placed World War II flashback story and an unnecessarily long epilogue, but neither will detract from readers' enjoyment. The humor and poignancy of the boys' parallel experiences will give teens something to consider and discuss. VERDICT A wonderful tale that's full of boyhood charm and meaty enough to engage fans of literary historical fiction.Pamela Schembri, Horace Greeley High School, Chappaqua, NY

Eighth grade is hard enough, but for Robert Carter it's made doubly worse by the constant threat of bullying. So when newcomer Nathan Tilly arrives in depressed Haverford, Maine, and saves him from a particularly wrenching confrontation with the local terror, Hollis Calhoun, Robert is forever indebted to his fearless classmate. The two become fast friends through school and over summer jobs working at the schlocky amusement park owned by Robert's dad. Tragedy further unites them as first Nathan and then Robert copes with devastating losses. Nathan is reckless and wild spirited in all the ways that Robert is not, including his pursuit of his high-school crush, Faye. George (A Good American, 2012) draws on Gatsbyesque themes, as Nathan pines after goals forever out of reach: the Daisy Buchanan like Faye and a life that is truly carefree, unencumbered by circumstances beyond his control. The mechanics of grief play out gracefully, even if the novel occasionally gets bogged down by relentless tragedy. An eloquent meditation on loss and the necessary action of letting go.

Two boys in 1970s Maine help each other weather tragedy.Robert Carter's friendship with the new kid in town, Nathan Tilly, gets off to a strong start in the middle school boys' room, where Nathan rescues him from a bully who has been beating the crap out of him year after year. Things head south the next day though, when Nathan's ebullient, kite-flying dad, who has promised to take them out for ice cream, falls off the roof of their house to his death, also crushing a mongoose named Philippe Petit (after the World Trade Center tightrope walker). This precipitous turn of events makes you wonder what to expect from the author—bold narrative moves or gratuitous tragedy? The answer is both. The highlight of the book is Fun-A-Lot, an amusement park owned by the Carter family. "The court of Camelot had been re-created on the coast of Southern Maine—Olde England in New England, as the legend above the gates put it. Teenage knights clanked about in ill-fitting plastic armor and damsels swept up and down the pathways in bodices garlanded with ribbons." (Shades of George Saunders' "My Chivalric Fiasco," though without the drugs.) As much as Robert's father hates his amusement park, it's dwarfed by the main source of misery in his life: Robert's older brother, Liam, who is gradually being debilitated by Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Liam's inexorable death, accompanied by a blistering soundtrack of the punk music he loves, devastates his family. But it does not slake the author's thirst for mayhem, as the final chapters of the book zip us back to World War II for mass murder of innocent civilians, kill off another main character, and throw in a little frustrated pedophilia. George (A Good American, 2012, etc.) can't separate his good ideas from his bad ones, but there's still a lot to enjoy here.