There is the day it happens, and then there is everything after.

Trav, thirteen, is trying to come to terms with the death of his father. Jay, Trav’s best friend, is tasked with going through a decade’s worth of writing that Trav wrote after finding his father dead. Stella, Trav’s mother, is trying to keep it together for her son while dealing with irreparable fallout in her adopted family. Together, they try to make sense of grief and its druggy comedown, and what happens when cursed destinies intersect. Powered by the prose — the rhythm and technique — of accent, sociolect, and place, this novel is working-class but not council-estate chic, grim but not grey, and blessed with a slangy Birmingham vernacular not readily found in modern fiction.