Hidden in the Mountains of East Tennessee, eleven-year-old Rodney goes about the business of being a boy during the summer of 1970. In the playground of his grandmother’s overgrown garden, he bears silent witness to the relentless cruelty of a teenage psychopath.

Rodney’s narrative of his family, flung between terror and innocence, is set in a small community carved from legacies of poverty, coal mining and religion