Rattlesnake Farming

I read this book when it was first released because I took a class from the author. Don't let the professional review put you off. The situations in which the characters find themselves are bizarre but the characters and completely human and understandable. The thesis of the book seems to be that normal lives are full of such bizarre tragedy and degradation that it is not possible to predict how people will react or to claim that one way of responding makes more sense than the other. Kramer deals with secrets and the effect of keeping them in her other works. This book address the secrets that we keep, or deny, or ignore as a society. She dramatizes this by creating teenage characters who look honestly at the world in which they live and are so dismayed that they have no appropriate way to respond. 15 years later I still remember vividly the scene in which the teenage daughter discovers her deep sense of betrayal that her father has kept from her the realities of poverty and inequality that surround them. Read this book. It will surprise you.