"What you need to do," Kevin said, "is publish a book called Rules for Every Thing."

"If I publish a book," Duke said, "I'm going to call it Handbook for Boys."

Growing up is tough...really tough.

But what if you had a handbook that told you how to figure things out? How to stay out of trouble? How to think about success? How to think about the guy on the street?

At Duke's Place, Jimmy and Kevin find out that the handbook isn't written down. It means listening to Duke and his friends talk about their lives. But how can Duke, a senior citizen, understand what it is to be young now?

In the tradition of his award-winning book Monster, Walter Dean Myers once again breaks new ground with this extraordinary, original, and complex novel about learning to be a man.