Sixteen-year-old Marley Kurtz is an incurable bookworm who is sent to a program for "maladapted" youth in Loweville, Colorado after his parents discover he has been having an affair with a man forty-three years his senior. Once there, Marley befriends the wry yet optimistic Missy, who is fifteen and pregnant in the lowest town on earth, and falls in love with Jesse, an ice-eyed sociopath with an outlaw for a father and a corpse for a mother. As the stress of the summer causes Marley's physical and mental health to decline, it is unclear which of his new friends has the worst influence on him, or whether the instruction of a small town's Baptist-run therapy group will do more harm than good to everyone involved.