Rule of the Bone

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. <P>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.