Used a little too much force?: Racial tensions and other matters in Brewster

Mark Slouka's novel Brewster continues to be engaging and appealing. Yes, some of the elements are a bit shopworn and predictable in this 1060s small-town coming-of-age novel: the sweet girl who falls for the tough guy who's sensitive within (Friday Night Lights? Step Up?), the two guys and a girl (Jules & Jim?), and yes Slouka is a little too fixated in providing period detail, in particular rock lyrics from the era, but all said and done the two main character, narrator Jon and best friend the pugilistic and troubled Ray, are very credible and intriguing - each struggling with difficult, even tragic family situations, and the plot clicks along nicely, especially when about half-way through Slouka introduces the theme of race - a group of black students bussed in from an nyc suburb create a lot of tensions among the small-town white culture in the high school - it will be interesting to see how this develops, but Slouka provides plenty of ominous foreshadowing - notably, as Jon overhears several conversations involving Ray's father, we begin to sense he was kicked off the police force for some incident involving someone black, in which perhaps he "used a little too much force," to quote a rock lyric on my own. The tensions are all below the surface - though the action is relatively confined, it's also clear that this is no idyllic coming-of-age novel. Slouka a very confident writer, and he does a great job with teenage dialogue and with a reflective (looking back on the past from a long time forward) first-person narrator. Why has this novel, and Slouka's work in general, drawn so little attention?