The story is told in first person. Billy is a child with multiple disabilities who lives near Cleveland in a section called Buckeye in the fifties. Billy has a difficult childhood as he is changed from school to school and is poorly educated by some tough teachers. His parents, George and Ann, are blue collar folks with their own problems - alcoholism, cheating, and poor jobs. The boy is in the middle of a large family - Georgie, Maisie, and twin brothers Stanley and Casimir (Cazie). The tempered feeling within the family is the strong shall survive as the weak ones are phased out.

As life proceeds, Billy faces odd Sunday School teachers, an alcoholic father who cheats on his wife, a poor example of a grandfather, an odd neighborhood lady, Stanley’s crazed Vietnam buddy, Cazie’s (the “good” twin) falling in love, an old lady named Joy meeting Georgie’s needs, and the moving in of a new lady from West Virginia and her child, Becky Sue.

Things happen. Mostly bad things. This is not a typical story that most readers like of a child with disabilities and happy endings. This is the story of poor people in the fifties and the misery of their lives, the mis-education of labeled “retards” during that era, and how anger builds as people attempt to escape their society’s ideas on the subject of fate.

Billy wants you to think that the ending is not a bad one. He thinks that is the way fate is supposed to be.- Preface written by WILMA SMITH, Cleveland Newscaster

- Concerns a child with disabilities living in the Buckeye section of Cleveland in the fifties

- Borders Books and Tapes will be selling it in the PD area

- first novel by retired educator from Kenston schools with his own set of disabilities as a result of cerebral aneurysm

- a difficult book with deep religious overtones. Has tough street language and a few of the behaviors shown by main character are disgusting

- written in first person