When Daniel Musgrove's troubled family moves to Mississippi just before his junior year, he is appalled. On top of the usual teenage humiliations, he now has to learn to say "y'all" and "Co-Cola" or risk being ostracized as a Yankee. But Daniel's loneliness fades when he meets fellow outsider Tim Cousins. You only need one best friend, he figures, to make it through high school alive. Daniel and Tim become inseparable, sharing a fascination with ridicule,...

In 1965, a backwoods Alabama boy named Peejoe encounters the harsh realities of the adult world through two murders--his eccentric Aunt's beheading of her husband and the killing of a young black man by a racist sheriff.