I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this book. When I began reading it I was confused by the narrative and didn't comprehend the point. But as I read further in I found a well written novel with a complex premise of blame, taking responsibility for our actions, and loyalty, and the folly of all these. 
 The story follows Isaac English, a brilliant just out of high school guy, Billy Poe, a former high school football player with no direction to speak of, a cop named Harris, Billy's mom Grace, and Billy's sister Lee. The author did something fantastic in allowing us to view each person's motivation as each well as how each well intended action led to more pain, more consequences, and a deeper feeling of isolation and hopelessness. I found it compelling that I could not think of any one of these characters as a bad person, just people that made the wrong choices perpetually for the wrong reasons. The writing style was gritty and the language was incredibly vivid when describing the beauty of these broken small towns and their squalor. 
 There was something meaningful about the situations presented in this novel. They required thought and honestly I wondered if I would make better decisions when considering the circumstances (most beyond their control) that these characters found themselves in . There is a line in the book that I think best encompasses the premise of this book and maybe the idea to analyze more critically. 
 "There was something particularly American about it--blaming yourself for bad luck--that resistance to seeing your life as affected by social forces, a tendency to attribute larger problems to individual behavior. The ugly reverse of the American Dream."