From the introduction: Summers in Texas are scorchers, but the heat doesn’t seem so bad when you’ve got good friends to pal around with. In most communities, kids greet the end of summer with a sense of sadness about having to return to school. That’s not the case for the kids of Cut and Shoot, Texas. For them, the end of summer means Bike Blitz, a kid-organized bike race through the nearby woods and The Basin, a stretch of bushes, dead trees, and other assorted nastiness at the edge of town. There are no winners or losers in the Blitz; it’s a rite of passage those in growing up in the community must pass if they don’t want to spend freshman year getting stuffed into lockers. For our heroes, a talking bicycle might be just what they need to make their way across the Basin to cross the finish line, avoid the town sheriff, and evade a group of bullies looking to cause chaos during the Blitz.