Where Things Come Back

The world has been buzzing about John Corey Whaley's Where Things Come Back, and for good reason! Whaley takes readers to the small, pretty boring town of Lily, Arkansas, where two big, strange things happen: a Lazarus woodpecker, long thought extinct, is supposedly spotted, and Cullen Witter's brother Gabriel disappears one day. The two events are connected in a way that, though this is fiction, is remarkably real for its sheer strangeness. Whaley writes the book in alternating chapters about Cullen and the town of Lily, and what at first seems like an unrelated story of a troubled young missionary and his college roommate. Cullen is, like many great literary heroes, hardly a hero, but he is a wonderful character, forever writing titles for novels he has yet to start and getting tangled up with troublesome girls. Through the summer of the Lazarus woodpecker - which has the entire town of Lily renaming everything in its honor, from burgers to motels - Cullen deals with nearly losing his parents to the insanity brought on by Gabriel's disappearance, nearly losing his best friend over an over-hyped ornithologist, and nearly losing his own will to go on without Gabriel. Yet he wonders, and you will wonder too, if somehow Lily could be where things, like the Lazarus and Gabriel, come back.