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. Meanwhile, the crisis of faith spawned by a young missionary s disillusiThis extraordinary tale from a rare literary voice finds wonder in the ordinary and illuminates the hope of second chances.ly seem, they are woven together through masterful plotting and merge in a surprising and harrowing climax.
