Amazon.com description: Product Description: In a scruffy California desert town in1980, a twelve-year-old boy struggles with a raging internal war of guilt and responsibility stemming from his family situation--a needy, hippie mother and a mentally handicapped brother. As he fights to define himself and to see a future for himself outside of the suffocating box of his home, real war is distant thunder, the stuff of boyish fantasy and games. But as he lets go of childhood and befriends a dangerous older kid, what was once play becomes terrifyingly real, and violence changes his life forever.