Shield the Joyous

Michael Haley, a whip-smart seventh-grader growing up in rural Mississippi in the early 1980s, has a precociously metaphysical turn of mind, a brand-new girlfriend who won’t come out of her bedroom, and plenty of neighborhood pals to distract him from both. But as he passes the long afternoon of this story roaming their streets, yards, and woods with the likes of Zeke Barry (his girlfriend’s broth...