Description: "Packed with enough ideas to fuel two or three books, Bick's ambitious, intelligent, and relentlessly dark novel is a notable achievement, even if it (understandably) wavers beneath its own weight. Seventeen-year-old Christian is a painter who is developing some disturbing talents: he can paint others' thoughts and memories, perhaps even influencing their actions. He is also having some vivid dreams in which he inhabits the body of a child in the 1940s, watching as a town business leader uses German POWs as laborers. Christian awakes from one of these fugues to find himself blamed for painting swastikas on a barn, a terrible event that results in two fortuitous meetings: a dying old man in a nursing home with a connection to Christian's dreams and a friendly psychiatrist who becomes his chief confidant. And that's just the tip of the iceberg: psychotic bullies, deformed babies, sex scandals--you almost need to take notes to keep up. Interest levels might fluctuate across overlong scenes, but patient readers will be well rewarded. Gut-punch of an ending, too." --Booklist

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