Truck — Katherine Dunn

With daring realism and stunning imagination, the author of Geek Love, Katherine Dunn, takes us on a journey into the mind of a feisty, adventurous adolescent named Jean ""Dutch"" Gillis. Dutch goes ""trucking"" from Portland, Oregon, to Los Angeles on a quest in search of herself, which, like the river trek of Deliverance, is filled with discoveries and sudden violence.

With boyish-looking Dutch is her friend Heydorf, a shadowy character who has his own secrets to hide. With her, too, is the confusion and volatile feelings of youth, when sex is a mystery waiting to be understood...and death seems remote until it brushes close with a breath-stopping suddenness. Truck, perhaps better than any other fictional account about a runaway, is a brilliantly convincing portrait of the archetypal teen rebel, and both the excitement and the terrible betrayals in the world she explores.