Book description
Leopold Bloom King is the son of an amiable, loving father who
teaches science at the local high school. His mother, a former nun, is
the high school principal and a respected Joyce scholar. He has had an
unremarkable, happy family life. But after Leo's ten-year-old brother
commits suicide, the family struggles with the shattering effects of
his death, and Leo, lonely and isolated, searches for something to
sustain him. Eventually, he finds his answer when he becomes part of a
tight knit group of older high school students that includes Sheba and
Trevor Poe - glamorous twins with an alcoholic mother and a
prison-escapee father - hard-scrabble mountain runaways Niles and
Starla Whitehead; socialite Molly Huger and her boyfriend, Chadworth
Rutledge X. It's an ever-widening circle whose liaisons will ripple
across two decades, from 1960s counterculture through to the dawn of
the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. The ties among them endure for years,
surviving marriages happy and troubled, unrequited loves and unspoken
longings, hard-won successes and devastating breakdowns, as well as
the American South's dark legacy of racism and class divisions. But
the final test of friendship that brings them to San Francisco is
something no one is prepared for.
