GOD OF BEER

Devastating consequences ensue when a group of high-school students stage acts of civil disobedience to protest various legal and social issues involving the use and abuse of beer in this original, provocative—if muddled—coming-of-age story. At 18, Kyle Nelson, an unambitious everyboy who prides himself on his social fluidity—“drinks with the preps, hunts with the chucks”—is drifting through his last year of high school in the Vermont countryside. While studying protest movements in social studies, Kyle and his two best friends, Diana, a brainy, basketball-playing beauty, and Quake, a whizzy, non-violent Quaker idealist, conceive a term project linking social protest to the communal but illegal glue of high-school life: beer. The kids have three related but somewhat incompatible goals for their project: to “lower the drinking age,” to “raise people’s awareness of alcohol,” and to “destroy the exaggerated status of drinking itself.” Hampering their objectives—and by extension the novel—is that their aims require prolonged explanations and are multifaceted and ill-assorted. So when tragedy strikes in the form of an alcohol-related car accident that punishes the innocent more than the guilty, it’s not clear what the reader is supposed to come away with. Keizer has an apt way with a description, an impoverished woman “looked a lot like the inside of her house . . . definitely poor yet very clean and pulled together,” and his characterizations, particularly of the working-class Vermonters, are discerning and perceptive. Thought-provoking. (Fiction. YA)