The God of War

From the New York Times bestselling author of Mary Coin an indelible novel about the end of childhood “the tender furies of adolescence the starkly beautiful descriptions of California’s inland Salton Sea and the devious valor of love” (Oprah Daily).The year is 1978. Ares Ramirez age twelve lives with his mother Laurel and his younger brother Malcolm in a trailer at the edge of the Salton Sea an unintentionally man-made body of water in the middle of the Southern California desert. It is a desolate forgotten place whose inhabitants thrive amidst seemingly impossible circumstances. By day birds fly across the desert sky. By night government fighter planes and helicopters make training runs using live ammunition and an anonymous dead body floats in from the sea. These events inspire Ares on the cusp of his adolescence to enact elaborate fantasies of mortal combat. His membership in a troubled family marks Ares as a casualty of a different kind of war. Malcolm age seven is mentally handicapped and his mother chooses not to do anything about it. Ares’s struggle with the burden of responsibility—to himself and to others—draws him into a world of drugs violence and sex that he is not prepared for launching him into a very personal battle for his own identity one that has a lethal outcome.