Chicago, 1978. Hank Boyd, a solid B+ student, a good kid, wants eighth grade to be his special year. But when Ralph, a troublemaker who's failed both the third and fifth grades, starts thinking that he and Hank are best friends, Hank's year becomes an odyssey that is as frightening as it is hilarious. Hank and Ralph join forces with Ralph's older cousins, Norm and Kenny, employees of the Tootsie Roll factory, and together they wreak havoc over Chicago's southwest side. It's a year of Styx, Cheap Trick, and Kiss, of Star Wars and CB radios, and of two very different boys attempting to make sense of the world, and of each other. When Hank, in a chance encounter, bumps into Ralph twenty-two years later, he quickly learns how much the past has a stranglehold on the present, and he can't help slipping back into the same role he played as a kid - a role that, as an adult, is fraught with far more serious consequences. THE BOOK OF RALPH is exquisitely rendered and defiantly unsentimental - a smart, assured novel from a wickedly astute young writer.