It is a coming of age story about Craig McMullen, a boy in Nebraska who lost his leg in a car accident, and the development of his sexual identity.

[1] He was a member of the Violet Quill, a group of gay writers (including Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, Robert Ferro, Felice Picano, Michael Grumley, and Christopher Cox) that met several times 1980 and 1981.

Wayne cannot express his sexuality publicly; he touches Craig's penis, and is arrested in a police raid at a bathroom in Omaha.

[3] Kirsch called it, alongside The Lost Language of Cranes by David Leavitt, an original piece of recent coming of age literature.

[8] John Mort of the Kansas City Star contrasted Whitmore's vision of Nebraska as filled with "grotesques" with that of traditional Great Plains authors Willa Cather, Mari Sandoz, and Wright Morris.