When we first meet him, Chappie is a punked-out teenager living with his mother and abusive stepfather in an upstate New York trailer park. During this time, he slips into drugs and petty crime. Rejected by his parents, out of school and in trouble with the police, he claims for himself a new identity as a permanent outsider; he gets a crossed-bones tattoo on his arm, and takes the name 'Bone.'
He finds dangerous refuge with a group of biker-thieves, and then hides in the boarded-up summer house of a professor and his wife. He finally settles in an abandoned schoolbus with Rose, a child he rescues from a fast-talking pedophile. There Bone meets I-Man, an exiled Rastafarian, and together they begin a second adventure that takes the reader from Middle America to the ganja-growing mountains of Jamaica. It is an amazing journey of self-discovery through a world of magic, violence, betrayal and redemption. 'The new rule was basically don't bother your parents and don't bother the cops or one of them will sic the other on you, because to them, to all of them you're just another homeless stoned dropout dealing small-load boom to the locals.' Russell Banks is the author of twelve works of fiction, including Continental Drift, Affliction, and The Sweet Hereafter. He lives in upstate New York. |