What happens when your father drunkenly humiliates you at your eighth-grade graduation? What happens when your closest friends in early childhood are the letters of the alphabet, each with its own personality, who visit you in bed? What happens when your mother, while walking out the door for good, tells you "I wish I were a knitter instead of a needlepoint artist so I could have solved you in the womb"? Fifteen-year-old Clayton Clevinger is what happens. When Clayton meets Shiny, whose mother is in prison for burning down a house and burning up a dog, all in the name of love, and whose aunt...