Sledding with a Ghost

How would you feel if you lost your father and best friend in freak accidents, all in one month? Pretty devestated, huh?  To top it off you're a little different in terms of the way you think about things; your thoughts move rapidly through your mind.  Eddie's life turned upside down and backwards in less than a month.  The two people that understood his unique style of thinking have just parished and his mother has engulfed herself into a corrupt church with a minister who has nothing better to do than to punish children.
  I chose this book thinking it would be similar to the other two Chris Crutcher books that I have read, but boy did I soon find out differently.  Eddie, to my astonishment, is not the main character...woah! Crazy right!?! Instead it's from the viewpoint of his dead friend, Billy, who is now kind of a ghost.  It's hard to label him with a term like that because he does not act very, well, ghostlike.  Now that he's dead, Billy knows everything and while there are things in the universe ten times better than hanging around Earth, he decides to stay to help him friend through the tough times in high school.  The other two Crutcher books that I have read both deal mainly about sports (which I like because I can relate well to athletics), but this book's emphasis was laid mainly on the life of a troubled teen.  I asked myself, "Why would Crutcher write books so far apart in plot and/or topic?" Well, I think that while he has people like me who are interested in sports and have become interested in those books, we might decide to keep reading his books and discover this one.  It's got more of a omnicent view on life and the world, and deals more with a seemingly "stupid" kid, who really in all actuality is extremely intelligent, and his troubles.  I guess I'll have to continue reading to figure out more about the oddness in this plot/topic change.
 Another funny thing is that Crutcher inserts one of his novels, Warren Peece, into the story, and the book gets banned by that minister dude I mentioned earlier.