simonteen:

This week’s free read on Pulseit is John Corey Whaley’s 2012 Printz-award winning WHERE THINGS COME BACK! Start reading now here! www.pulseit.com/where-things-come-back 

Summary: 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 15-year-old brother, Gabriel, inexplicably disappears. 

Meanwhile, the crisis of faith spawned by a young missionary’s disillusion in Africa prompts a frantic search for meaning that has far-reaching consequences. As distant as the two stories initially seem, they are woven together through masterful plotting and merge in a surprising and harrowing climax.