"When the sugarcane's burning and the rabbits are running, look for the boys who are quicker than flame."

When Charlie moves to the small town of Taper, Florida, he discovers a different world. Pinned between the everglades and the swampy banks of Lake Okeechobee, the small town produces sugar cane ... and the fastest runners in the country. Kids chase muck rabbits in the fields while the cane is being burned and harvested. Dodging flames and blades and breathing smoke, they run down the rabbits for three dollars a skin. And when they can do that, running a football is easy.

But there are things in the swamp, roaming the cane at night, that cannot be explained, and they seem connected to sprawling mounds older than the swamps. Together with his step-second cousin “Cotton” Mack, the fastest boy on the muck, Charlie hunts secrets in the glades and on the muck flats where the cane grows secrets as old as the soft earth, secrets that haunted, tripped, and trapped the original native tribes, ensnared conquistadors, and buried runaway slaves. Secrets only the muck knows.

What People Are Saying:

"N.D. Wilson keeps his teen readers hopping in this action-packed adventure. The main theme—good versus evil—is tightly interwoven throughout many other concurrent themes, including dysfunctional family relationships, child abuse, racism, and sugar cane harvest and muck rabbit history.... Amid the muck and the mire (pun intended), Wilson masterfully ties the endurance of Charlie and Cotton—those brave underdogs—to football. Overall, BOYS OF BLUR is definitely a great coming-of-age story with a wonderfully orchestrated mix of themes." - Kidsreads