What if you were a 15 year old white boy in Texas with some sort of irritable bowl condition, and your best friend were a gay Mexican boy who couldn't take the cruel teasing of his classmates, and shot and killed 16 people at high school, including himself?
What if, because Jesus (your best friend) is dead and also a murderer, and the townspeople want answers, and blood, you suddenly find yourself in jail, not yet accused of a crime, but coming close?
What if you befriended a CNN reporter, the only semi-decent reporter in town, only to have him betray you, sleep with your mother, and then you find out that he's actually a Machiavellian opportunist who would sell his own blind mother down the river for an opportunity to make it in media, and that in actuality, he's a TV repairman with delusions of grandeur?
What if you had secrets you were trying to cover up, and evidence was starting to point to your guilt, and you wanted some time for the truth to simmer and bubble and somehow find its way to the surface?
Well, if you were Vernon Little, you'd get the heck out of dodge for awhile. And since Vernon saw the 80's film, Against All Odds, he wants to live in a hut in Mexico with his fantasy girl, Taylor. So begins the adventure in this book, and a character compared mostly with Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield. I'm not sure I loved this book, but it definitely held my interest, and I read the second half of it in one sitting. And I must admit, the over the top blood thirst of the media in this book is begging for a film adaptation.
I read this the year it won the prize and I have to say that I was so disappointed in it. It just didn't ring true for me. My copy was quickly donated to a charity shop.
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