I received a review copy of this book from the publisher. 
 I liked the story itself, but I really liked Olivia Moon and I loved that it was set in West Virginia, the birthplace of my maternal grandmother and a place of great beauty and great poverty, which is alternately maligned and ignored by the rest of the country. 
 When we lived in Utah, for a while we lived next door to a couple who spent some time riding the rails (when they weren't squatting in abandoned properties). They also played punk rock with their band until late into the summer nights, but it never kept my kids awake, so I never minded much. There was something kind of romantic about the way they talked about the freedom and the danger and the community that surrounded hobo life, and it was interesting to read Walsh's fictionalized take on this. 
 Her characters were rich, and while the emotion was a little melodramatic at times, it wasn't so overdone that it pushed into the unrealistic. I dislike writer characters in novels, so my annoyances with Jazz on that account I'm willing to set aside (except for her accidentally writing poems while eating a bagel in a nameless coffee shop. That detail seemed a little overwrought). 
 I found myself feeling like characters as young as Olivia and Jazz couldn't possibly make the kinds of life decisions they were making, which is a little funny when I look back on just how qualified I felt to direct my own life when I was their age and younger. It was kind of fun to go back into the tangled emotions of that time. 
 The detail with which Walsh describes Olivia's perspective, although clumsy in the first few pages, quickly becomes comfortable and vivid and really helps me feel what her world is like. 
 Although I found the ending a little too tidy (I'm rarely completely happy with a book's ending), it didn't stop me from quite enjoying this book.