I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I feel that this novel was the easiest to relate to. It encompassed a good variety of the things that adolescents deal with in varied extremity. The one topic that the book focused on that interested me was that of friendship. It was interesting to read about how Junior and his friends interacted. For instance, at the beginning of the novel when he and Rowdy were friends, they had such a close but distant friendship. They were the only ones that each other could turn to, but at the same time, Rowdy was almost afraid to get too close to Junior. More interesting than that was when Junior was playing against Rowdy at the basketball games. The fact that he truly still loved Rowdy as a friend, despite what Rowdy had done to him was a completely selfless act. Junior being able to look past what Rowdy being mean and abandoning him and truly still care about Rowdy over himself was very noble. At the end of the novel, when Rowdy and Junior become friends again was something else that I found interesting. The fact that Rowdy finally saw that Junior wasn’t really abandoning him, and that he was just trying to not only better himself, but try to forge a path for other tribe members was truly enlightening. I feel like Rowdy coming back was one of the only ways he could show Junior that he truly cared about him as well. I also believe that the fight that Rowdy and Junior got into was a common truth for most adolescents. Many teens fight with each other over things because they either aren’t able to understand an action (or situation) or just aren’t able to cope with it. The friendship between Rowdy and Junior really made the book more believable to me.
