Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley

Cullen Witter is a pretty average kid. He has a best friend and protector in Lucas Calder, and they both hang out with his younger (although he looks older) brother Gabriel. It starts out as a typical summer until that bird begins getting all the attention. Some crackpot from out of town claims to have seen a Lazarus woodpecker that is supposed to be extinct, and suddenly the whole population of Lily, Mississippi has Woodpecker Fever!

The local burger place has a Lazarus Burger...which is really a Number Three without cheese. His aunt even gets in on the action offering a Woodpecker haircut: a mohawk-style with bright red tips. The whole town is obsessed!

Annoyed as they are, there isn't much they can do about it. Cullen even goes on a date! His date has problems of her own, having just escaped a shotgun wedding with a man slightly obsessed with The Book of Enoch. (It's a long story.)

It's a typical summer, until that day when Gabriel disappears. Just vanishes without a trace. No signs of struggle, no forced entry, nothing... The police ask "Could he have run away?" but only someone who didn't know Gabriel would ask that question. At first, it seems like a possibility. Any moment he could walk back through the door. Time stands still, waiting for him to return...and so does Cullen.

At first, his father throws himself into the investigation. Calling the police for updates at all hours, going to the public library to do research, giving up jobs to stay home. His mother, on the other hand, deteriorates over time. The longer Gabriel is gone, the more she seems to check out. How do you deal with not knowing?

To pass the time, Cullen comes up with book titles to describe his situations: It Is Not a Sin to Kill a Woodpecker, This Popcorn Tastes Like People, Five A.M. Is for Lovers and Lawn Ornaments.

This is a bittersweet coming of age story, peppered with humor and sadness, with twists and turns, just like real life. It's a little weird, but I like weird. It won both the Prinz Award, and the Morris Award...so I'm not the only one :)

"Gabriel, though, didn't really like going outside or swimming or anything like that. He liked to stay in, read books, watch TV, and pretend he was grown up. I never wanted to feel grown up, to be like an adult. I wanted to scream until it hurt my throat and made me talk funny for the rest of the day, and I wanted to run through my neighbor's sprinklers and track mud into the house and shake my wet hair like a dog would in the middle of the living room. In church, I used to try and get my brother to play tic-tac-toe on the bulletin, but he always refused, shushing me and pointing to the preacher. My brother once told me that God was like the best musician in the world, because he put together all the sounds of nature and gave people like Jimi Hendrix his fingers and John Lennon his brain," (Whaley pg 121, 2011).

*Library Link*

If you liked this, check out:
The Fault In Our Stars by John Green
Close to Famous by Joan Bauer
Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos

Whaley, John Corey, & Atheneum Books for Young Readers. (2011). Where things come back: A novel. New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers.