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A funny, bittersweet exploration of how a child can change in one short year of love, loss, and growing up... Seven-year-old Scotty Ocean decides that seven is going to be �his year.� But soon after his birthday, his artist-turned-alcoholic mother abandons the family�leaving Scotty and his two older sisters alone with their father. As his perfect year is torn apart (falls apart?), Scotty begins to act out during school and takes a series of increasingly wild actions to try to win his mother back�and, when that doesn�t work, to replace her. Funny and deeply affecting, An Ocean in Iowa traces Scotty�s desperate attempt to hold on to his childhood while the foundation of his family disintegrates. As Scotty�s year as a seven-year-old flies by�and the dreaded eight approaches�Hedges explores how Scotty sheds his childhood in a one-eighty of the year he hoped would be so perfect. Beautifully written, and with Hedges�s careful attention to period detail, this compelling coming-of-age novel sets the private turmoil of a disintegrating family against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the turbulent 1960s.