"Bob Welch has written about his war against alcoholism as courageously as he waged it".--The New York Times Book Review.

    

    Underneath such ordinary events, enormous personal changes happen to Omar. He learns about his parents' frailties and their very different family backgrounds as he sorts through questions about his own identity and destiny. Under Louis Rubin's touch, Charleston in the late 1930s exerts its own effect on Omar's maturation. It proves a baffling, traumatic, enriching time in a boy's life, and the reader shares it acutely (Booklist).