My next Must Read Recommend: Rides of the Midway  by  Lee Durkee.  This book actually came out in 2002, but I just found out about it from a co-worker, Carly Akers at MPL.  (She actually knows the author).  This is a coming of age novel about Noel Weatherspoon, whose life-changing moment comes at age 10, when he plows into a boy named Ross Altman at a Little League game (Ross was the catcher) and has the bad luck to put the boy into a coma. This happens in small-town Mississippi, excarbated by his stepfather being a Baptist preacher and Billy Graham wannabe, and, as the NYT reviewer put it, the kind of person who eats pizza with a fork. (His mother's first husband, his father, is presumed dead in Viet Nam. Last seen boarding a ride at the carnival). By his junior year of high school, Noel is a Lynnrd Skynnrd-listening, drug dealing borderline dropout, with a dropout in waiting younger brother Matt, and a stepbrother named Ben who everybody loves. The book is packed with drugs, start to finish, and includes a truly Portnoyesque encounter with a watermelon. At some point someone gives Noel a Nikon camera, which may provide a clue to his rescue, fate-wise.