How to become a man?

This summer in the West is that the young French of "Foreign students" pass in the forests of Colorado, after his first year as a college boy at the University of Virginia. There must earn enough to subsist in the second, including tuition fees have just been offered to him in extremis by a generous donor, at the end of the previous novel. To join the labor camp, he five thousand kilometers to go, hitchhiking course, and the "road", although this American myth, so rich, offers him a taste of the adventure that awaits him, rough, sometimes dangerous, far removed from the comfort of his student life. He met the American soul, quick to engage fully to him who is only passing. He came across Amy, musician backpacker, rare and short parenthesis in love in this story of men. At the camp, he discovered the demanding work and men, precisely, seemingly unsophisticated, in a quasi-military organization, demanding that tolerates no weakness. Long days to spray insecticide every diseased tree, to carry heavy cans to handle the sprayers, will transform his body but also his mind. The student is in a few weeks a man among men, "a tough guy", learning to make her up with his own weapons, he discovers along the way. It overcomes the trials of community life, discovering unexpected solidarity that will help and will grow the decisive moments. The novel is also a splendid hymn to the American forest, which Mack, the surly leader of West Beaver Camp, will initiate that everyone now called Frenchy. At the end of the summer, when the camp was dissolved, while a tragedy comes to light violently without dispel the mystery maintained by Bill, the friendly giant and erased our college boy, one hesitates: he comes for the first time to "make a living", he knows he has not stolen the $ 900 he pocketed literally, men he touched will hit the road for others too hard yards , precarious but free. The desire to follow the longer the touch. What will he decide?
This story, like a thrilling adventure story and which one can not help but turn the pages, should be on the shelf of any library for youth. In any case, the "White" Gallimard should not, in this case, intimidate or parents teens.