In the remarkable, bizarre, and heart-wrenching summer before Cullen Witter’s senior year of high school, everything he thinks he understands about his small and painfully dull Arkansas town vanishes. His cousin overdoses; his town becomes absurdly obsessed with the alleged reappearance of an extinct woodpecker; and most troubling of all, his sensitive, gifted fifteen-year-old brother, Gabriel, suddenly and inexplicably disappears.
As Cullen navigates a summer of finding and losing love, holding his fragile family together, and muddling his way into adulthood, a young, disillusioned missionary in Africa searches for meaning wherever he can find it. Through masterful plotting, these two stories are brought face-to-face in a surprising and harrowing climax that is tinged with melancholy and regret, comedy and absurdity, and above all, hope.
Judy B. says:
"This book just got a nod from Publishers Weekly as one of the best of 2011, and a ABC New Voices Pick for 2011.
It is a beautifully written story about a young man in a small town who is experiencing the puzzling disappearance of his little brother, the death of a teen cousin from drugs, the scientific search for a missing bird, once thought extinct, and of course, first love.
It's about death and loss and hope and belief and recovery. And second chances.
I wouldn't be surprised if it won a Newbery award this year. "
