Powder River, 1957

"The year my mother left us, my father found a dog along the highway just outside of Powder River." Thus opens the beginning of sixteen-year-old Matthew Christman's account of his senior year. Reeling from his loss, Matthew struggles to make sense of the adult world into which he has been forced to enter prematurely. He faces other losses, foremost among them his innocence, as he tries to figure out the difference between being a man's man, or a good man like his father. The threat of death is e