Mr. Blossom shares a powerful coming of age story which lays bare the way young men are socialized in our culture. From an insider's perspective, he portrays one early teen's harsh and even traumatic baptism into what our culture says a man should be, and the inner conflicts of a boy both wanting, and not wanting, to fit into that mold. In this age of the #metoo movement, it's important to understand how many men are socialized into sexism, alcohol abuse, macho behavior, and denial of any degree of vulnerability. Blossom does all that, and more. In terse prose, he allows us to witness one boy's struggle to be himself, and also to try to fit into a toxic variant of macho culture into which he has been abandoned by his father. While the world of the stables where his main character struggles to fit in is more extreme than many other testing grounds for boys becoming men in our culture, it is only so in degree, not in kind. Perhaps because this world is so over the top, it helps us to see what is all around us, and the messages we give our boys about who they should be. A must-read.