Dave and his brother Toph live through the deaths of both their mother and father and then set off in their car heading west across America alone, angry but suddenly very free. The power of the book is not in the story but in the way it is told, so we are not going to waste our time writing another review. We will quote a couple of sentences from a review by the "Daily Mail", though.
Just so you get a taste of how this guy writes we are going to reprint a little excerpt. It's from early on in the book, both parents have run the course of their respective illnesses and the author and his brother Toph are in their car heading west for a new life somewhere else.
"Please look. Can you see us? Can you see us, in our little red car? Picture us from above, as if you were flying above us, in, say, a helicopter, or on the back of a bird, as our car hurtles, low to the ground at sixty, sixty-five, around the relentless, sometimes ridiculous bends of Highway 1. Look at us, goddamit, the two of us greedily cartwheeling toward everything we are owed. Every day we are collecting on what's coming to us, each day we're being paid back for what is owed, what we deserve, with interest, with some extra fucking consideration - we are owed, goddamit - and so we are expecting everything, everything. We get to take what we want, one of each choice, any make, any color, as much as we want, when we want, whatever we want. Today we have nowhere to be so we're on our way to Montara, a beach about thirty-five minutes south of San Francisco, and right now we are singing.
Toph does not know the words, and I know few of the words, but you cannot fucking stop us from singing. I'm trying to get him to do the backing vocals while I sing the lead. I point to him when his part comes but he just looks at me blankly. I point to the radio, then to him, then to his mouth, but he's still confused, and it's hard doing all of this while trying not to careen off the road and into the Pacific and I guess in a way the gestures look like I want him to eat the radio. But Jesus, he should be able to figure this out. He isn't cooperating. Or he could be dumb. Is he dumb?
Fuck it - I go solo.
.....
We cannot be stopped from looking with pity upon all the world's sorry inhabitants, they unblessed by our charms, unchallenged by our trials, unscarred and thus weak, gelatinous.
The matchup is unfair: Us vs Them. We are dangerous. We are daring and immortal. Fog swirls up from the cliffs below and blows over the highway. Blue breaks from beyond the fog and sun suddenly screams from the blue."
