Surfaces of a Diamond

This delightfully subtle second novel about Omar Kohn of Charleston, South Carolina, recalls his fifteenth summer, marked by playing baseball, writing for a newspaper, reading about the Civil War, daydreaming, and going on his first date. Underneath such ordinary events, enormous personal changes happen to Omar. He learns about his parents' frailties and their very different family backgrounds as he sorts through questions about his own identity and destiny. "Under Louis Rubin's touch, Charleston in the late 1930s exerts its own effect on Omar's maturation. It proves a baffling, traumatic, enriching time in a boy's life, and the reader shares it acutely" (Booklist).