Jim Dodge – Stone Junction (Canon Classics)

Charging like a runaway semitrailer on a downhill grade and spanning the era from Haight-Ashbury's Summer of Love into the darkness of 1980s Manhattan, Stone Junction is a wise and wildly imaginative novel about Daniel Pearse, an orphaned child who is taken under the wings of the AMO -- the Alliance of Magicians and Outlaws. An assortment of sages sharpen Daniel's wide-eyed outlook until he has the concentration of a card shark Zeta master, via apprenticeships in meditation, safecracking, poker, and the art of walking through walls. Wizards are made, not born, and this unconventional education sets Daniel on the trail of mysteries ancient and modern.A strange, six-pound diamond sphere held by the U.S. government in a New Mexico vault, rumored to be the Philosopher's Stone or the Holy Grail, becomes the AMO's obsession. In time, Daniel perfects his powers and heads off to steal the magic stone, and what happens changes his life forever.

Stone Junction is a bravura act of storytelling, both a free-spirited adventure and a parable about the powers within all of us.