Lizard

An unusual and compelling first novel. When Miss Cooley finds herself a new beau, Alton Broussard, she packs young Lucius Sims, her ward, off to the Leesville State School for Retarded Boys. Here, because of his strangely deformed face, he's given the nickname, Lizard. Already you can see the territory this story inhabits - we're in rural Louisiana in the 1970s with a cast of misfits, weirdos and eccentrics. Lizard escapes from the school with the aid of a pair of itinerant actors who need him to play the part of Caliban in a two-bit production of The Tempest in Birmingham, Alabama. On the road he meets some amazingly strange characters, hears any number of richly embroidered tall stories and continues to ponder the question of who was his father? Recommend this to older students who prefer character and atmosphere to action and plot.