They are even better at keeping them from each other. Max Walker is a golden boy, with a secret that the world may not be ready for. This novel is a riveting tale of a family in crisis, a fascinating exploration of identity, and a coming-of-age story like no other.

    He is looking forward to one more year of high school and then, he hopes, being picked up by a Big Ten team. But after the Jaws of Life tear him from the wreckage of his drunk-driving accident, he wakes up post-surgery in the University of Iowa Hospital’s long-term pediatric ward, wondering if he will ever walk again. Bobby McGin only wants one thing out of life, to be a normal teen with normal friends. But when your last-possible round of chemo fails to stem the spread of the tumors ravaging your body’s soft tissue, it’s hard to be normal. Nikki Pagan is the glue that holds the two boys together. She is a bright and precocious fifteen-year-old girl. Why is she on the long-term ward? Why won’t she talk about what is wrong with her? And why is it so important she follow “the rules for being Nikki”?

    Here she presents a technicolored vision of rural adolescence, the story of a girl with an unpronounceable name---a fiery, unhinged, growling, big-hearted queer country girl in a dirty black tutu and combat boots who travels along all the bizarre yet familiar byways of human desire from the cornfields of Louisiana and the big brass sound of Mardi Gras to the heights of the Empire State Building. Turning the tradition of the southern gothic novel on its head, Woods presents a new land of contemporary misfits including fire-dancers, pseudo-Nazis who breed albino animals, Catholic workers, horse thieves, and the archangel Gabrielle.A bold exploration of the intersections of race, class, and sexuality, The Albino Album contemplates the relationships between political action, art and romance, as our heroine tries on a series of bewitchingly fantastical families looking for the place to call home.