Excerpt:

The first time my heart stopped, I was twelve years old at my cousin’s wedding. The reception was held in this postal union hall, only my aunts had done everything over in lavender and yellow crepe paper. They had a D.J. of course – there’s no such thing as a wedding band in Iowa. The D.J. was my cousin Kenny, fifteen years old, awkward, pimply, really into stereo equipment and computers. His mother had recently been sent to prison for drug and parole violations, and so everybody was trying to give Kenny something constructive to do, you know, show him another path to take besides his mother’s.

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