Miles Halter wants to create a different life for himself and he heads to the private boarding school his father attended, Culver Creek, in Alabama for his junior year of high school, leaving behind his lack of friends and failure to fit in. He goes in search of a Great Perhaps.
At his new school Miles quickly makes friends beginning with his roommate, nicknamed the Colonel, a girl named Alaska and a hip-hip emcee named Takumi. These three musketeers bond with Miles and take on defending him after Miles is bound in duct tape and thrown into a pond by the Weekday Warriors, the rich students at the boarding school.
The four friends open the doors to smoking, dating, sex, and trust.
This is an inner journey story that grows through a series of pranks, moments of sharing and connection and experiments with love and lust that coalesce on a moment of painful tragedy.
In the end the survivor/warrior friends still standing find the way through their own personal pain.
An oft challenged book due to explicit sex.
221 pages 978-0525475064 Ages 14 and up (Grades 9 and up)
Recommended by: Barb Langridge, abookandahug.com
********** "Before. Miles “Pudge” Halter is done with his safe life at home. His whole life has been one big non-event, and his obsession with famous last words has only made him crave “the Great Perhaps” even more (Francois Rabelais, poet). He heads off to the sometimes crazy and anything-but-boring world of Culver Creek Boarding School, and his life becomes the opposite of safe. Because down the hall is Alaska Young. The gorgeous, clever, funny, sexy, self-destructive, screwed up, and utterly fascinating Alaska Young. She is an event unto herself. She pulls Pudge into her world, launches him into the Great Perhaps, and steals his heart. Then. . . . After. Nothing is ever the same."--from the publisher
221 pages 978-0142402511 Ages 14 and up
