A 2001 Coming of Age Story by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, Walker's Crossing follows Ryan, a preteen boy in Wyoming who dreams of being a cowboy. Ryan gradually heads toward the role of Only Sane Man as his older brother Gil and best friend Matt gravitate toward a Neo-Nazi movement.
Tropes:
- Beauty Contest: Ryan and Gil's sister Charlene is campaigning to be rodeo queen and is annoyed that Gil's extremism reflects poorly on her.
- Career-Ending Injury: Lon Walker can't be a cowboy anymore because he hurt his leg when a horse bucked him off.
- Cool Aunt: The Walkers' aunt Peg is an encouraging mentor toward Ryan and openly denounces the white supremacists.
- Don't Make Me Take My Belt Off!: Lon sometimes threatens to "take a strap" to Gil for making white supremacist comments.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Mr. Sheldon is The Corruptor to a pack of Hate Sink Neo-Nazis, but he's pretty warm toward his wife and children.
- Mama Didn't Raise No Criminal: Lon and Doris Walker have difficulty accepting that their eldest son is a member of a gun-toting Neo-Nazi group, with Doris (who is fairly racist herself) trying to rationalize Gil's behavior and beliefs while Lon does his best to ignore the signs.
- Never My Fault:
- Right-Wing Militia Fanatic and Conspiracy Theorist Mr. Sheldon burns down his barn because he left his heater on and propped it up against the wood. Even after his friends and the arson inspector tell him that the fire was clearly an accident, he insists that the government burned down his barn to punish him for his beliefs.
- After Gil is arrested, Doris Walker wails about how she never taught her children to hate anyone. This is despite how she spends most of the book congratulating Gil for his involvement in a Neo-Nazi group and taking passages from the Bible out of context to claim that people of different races shouldn't live near each other.
- Put on a Prison Bus: Gil, Matt's father, and several of their cronies are arrested for shooting down a Game & Fish plane they thought belonged to the ATF, and are awaiting trial at the end of the book.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Principal Phillips and Ms. Wells try to convince their students that the local Neo-Nazi ideology is wrong with a mixture of caring concern and firm logic.
- Right-Wing Militia Fanatic: Mr. Sheldon, Gil, and Gil's friends are camo-wearing thugs who "patrol" the territory. They can't go through a conversation without expressing venomous, poorly reasoned hatred and distrust for the government, immigrants, and African Americans. Gil even has Hitler's birthday marked on his calendar.
- Sub-Par Supremacist: Gil Walker is a virulent white supremacist who has only held one minimum wage job since he graduated from high school, and lost it in a month. Since then, he's moved back in with his parents and never does any more work around the ranch than he has to. Multiple characters explicitly state that he tears down anyone whose skin is a different color because it's the only way he can feel remotely important and powerful.
- Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: By the second half of the book, just about every word out of 12-year-old Matt's mouth is from a Right-Wing Militia Fanatic viewpoint and uttered with smug, frightening certainty.
- The Un-Favorite: Ryan’s mother treats him worse than her other kids, partially out of long-lasting resentment over going through a seventeen-hour Screaming Birth when he was born.
