Book excerpt: It's 1998, and Jim Diffin is a charming, reckless, college sophomore with a unique moral code, a crew of wild friends, and no interest in serious relationships. That is, until he meets Diana Huntington, a precocious teenager who doesn't fall for him so easily and embodies everything he's ever wanted. The longer they date, the more her cool aloofness entrances him. His friends, a memorably eclectic mix of social outcasts offer no shortage of dubious advice and the usual relief of tea with his mother will lose its typical solace once he learns she has worse troubles herself. And while comforting his mother, weighing the insights of his friends, and agonizing over Diana, his mindset opens to a new way, but can his compassion, patience and burgeoning enlightenment ever win him the girl? In the course of The Way Rain Falls, blind hope and frenzied despair send Jim careening from candle-lit dinners to street fights, intimate camp-outs to a drug fueled road trip to Canada, and an indiscretion Jim may never live down.