When fifteen-year-old Ramazac is thrown from a Malaysian oil derrick by his wildcat father with the admonition, "Bon voyage, bitch boy Hope you float longer than your mom did," the only thing he could think about was missing his rig tail. On the other hand, when Troy, the Newport Beach High School quarterback, gets shipped off to religious camp as punishment for downloading music, he's convinced it's a death sentence designed to ruin his life. The result is Shim-Sham (407 pages, 129,742 words), a coming-of-age story celebrating two fantastically unique souls with only one thing in common: a Fijian princess.
In Shim-Sham, we experience the implausible misadventure of Ramazac and the torturous journey of Troy as only they could tell it. While the two boys don't actually know each other, they are about to get introduced and it will change their lives. But before they meet at summer's end, they're introduced to demolition experts for the KKK; preachers drinking sake, rigging lotteries and fleecing dances from strippers;, a redneck thug with a powerful addiction to Rocky Mountain oysters who sings Dixie in Spanish, crazed lawyers, crooked judges, puppy love, Navy SEALSs, kidnappings, fraternity scams, three continents, several states, and one hell of a history lesson.