I believe this is a "young adult" novel, but regardless of your age I think it is an excellent story. I did not predict the final outcome at all. I will add this to my list of books I suggest to friends who want books for their young readers.

From the back:
In the remarkable, bizarre, and heart-wrenching summer before Cullen Witter’s senior year of high school, he is forced to examine everything he thinks he understands about his small and painfully dull Arkansas town. 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 seraches for meaning wherever he can find it. And when those two stores collide, a surprising and harrowing climax emerges that is tinged with melancholy and regret, comedy and absurdity, and above all, hope.

Left in a Little Free Library in the 900 block of Stanford.

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