The Clarence Darrow style lawyer that has agreed to take his case is currently tied up with another matter and has asked his young client to write down the circumstances leading up to the event. What emerges is the story of a sad, smart, enaging young man who lost his mother at birth and who's been abandoned by an alcoholic actor of a father. Initially friendless at his new school, Peter soon meets and befriends Jordan, a rich, chronically ill young man with a quirky sense of self and he and Peter become soul-mates.

Mr. Hoyt the headmaster of the school is a deeply troubled man and while the two mockingly refer to him as Reverand Davidson from Rain, they unwisely dismiss the danger that his closeted homosexuality poses to two irrespressible children of the late sixties. Perhaps the two should have paid more attention when they studied the Greek tragedies.

This book written in the late sixties is still fresh and relevent and doesn't show the age that many of its contemporary works of fiction do.

The writing is great and we hear echos of a more self aware Holden Caulfield in the prose. The young protagonist and his friend are eminantly likeable and their adolescent bravado makes you feel that nothing too serious can occur, despite the heavy forshadowing given by its narrator being in a jail cell at the outset.

This book is well worth the read. The author went on to write much of the dialogue for the Broadway smash A Chorus Line and his talent clearly shows in this earlier work.