Flotilla - Half of A Synopsis

This is the first half of the synopsis I'm sending to literary agents. I don't want to give away how the entire book goes but wanted to share where I am with you.

What if you had to become a man at the edge of the world? Jim Westfield enjoyed being a slacker in suburban LA until his father moved them to the Colony, an experimental fishing community over a hundred miles off the Pacific Coast. Jim's flirtation with drugs and alcohol thrusts him into a dangerous world. Dodging the sharks, drug smugglers and pirates in a place where the nearest cop or sailor is a hundred miles away, Jim will grow up fast ... too fast. Does hardship turn you into a man or a monster? Is there a difference?

Before all of this, before Jim came to the Colony and before he completed a two-week stay in a rehab center for alcohol, Jim was just normal kid. He was simply a suburban teenage white kid in Los Angeles with his mother, his sister and his step-father. Other than his missing dad, the ex-con with multiple felonies, things were fine…sort of. It may have taken five years, but when Rick reappears again, Jim and his father both start a tenuous process to rebuild their relationship. While that happens, Jim starts down a bad path; He starts waking up in strange places because of his binge drinking. It becomes obvious to his parents and step-Dad that Jim needs more structure and direction in his life. Where else could Jim find it except by spending his summer out on the open ocean enduring back-breaking labor?

Jim is sent to the Colony on the same day he leaves his alcohol-treatment…Adjusting to life in such a strange place would be a story in and of itself. Jim has to endure the hazing and mild abuse that goes with the territory in such a far-off place. You wake up at 4:30 to tend to your crop of fish and spend the rest of the day working at the floating gun range or participating in your dad’s zany, semi-legal scams. Or maybe you run a scam or four of your own and hope the old man doesn’t find out. You observe the weirdness of the free-sprits who treat their life on the Colony as a massive performance-art piece. You’ll deal with the obvious nutters, the cut-throat drug operations that a few bad apples insist on running and the pioneer-types who just want to make an honest living. You’ll sit back at watch the show while you slowly come to the truth: That it runs at all is a testament to the human spirit and the desperation of the human flotsam that populates a place like this.