The prose in this is just outstanding; there's something so effortless about it. I don't think there's a laboured sentence in here. It's so elegantly, so beautifully written... one of those books I think I could read again and again, just for the repeated experience of that prose. Especially when read on a warm summer's evening... I covet that prose, I really do.

The story itself is both simple and horribly not. There are two adolescent boys, best friends, and in a moment of thoughtlessness, of petty jealousy, one does something that alters the other's life forever. He instantly regrets it, and does his best to atone, but there are fracture lines running through the relationship now, places that don't bear looking at too closely, and all of this is set in the beginnings of WW2 in America, in a school where all the students are very soon to be subject to the draft. Which is something else none of them can bear to realistically face, because the stories of war are quite different to the realities and that, too, is a gap they are all suspicious of and so the last school year before adulthood, that last golden summer of looking away, gets thinner and more false as time goes on. It's so quietly and beautifully told, and it's just so, so good.