18-year-old Josse longs to leave his quiet life in Northern Germany and in order to ensure his acceptance into a competitive US high-school exchange program, he crafts a calculated persona for the all-important questionnaire: a conservative, nature-loving, and deeply religious youth designed to appeal to the American heartland. This strategic deception leads him to Laramie, Wyoming, where he is welcomed by the Atkinson family.
Once on American soil, he tries to adjust to a surreal high school existence defined by a spectacular clash of cultures. His journey toward self-assertion is marked by a series of bizarre yet formative encounters - ranging from an intense "psycho-war" with his host brother and a chaotic skirmish with a skunk to a romantic entanglement with a local girl named Maureen. He even strikes up an improbable correspondence with a German-American inmate awaiting execution on death row.
This new life is abruptly interrupted by a phone call from home: his middle brother has been killed in a car accident. Returning to Germany for the funeral, he enters a household paralyzed by a heavy, suffocating grief. In this environment of morbid stillness, he becomes a pained observer of his parents' sorrow. Fearing he will be consumed by this atmosphere, he eventually flees back to the Wyoming plains to complete his high school year.
The novel masterfully juxtaposes the active pursuit of an independent identity in America versus the crushing, static weight of loss in Germany.
