Book Review: Where Things Come Back

I'm always on the look-out for boy-friendly fare, so when the Brightly Newsletter mentioned John Corey Whaley's Where Things Come Back, I placed the title on one of my endless lists. Although it was indeed written with young male readers in mind, I didn't care for it very much. I think, perhaps, I was most annoyed with the author's habit of shifting between third person and second person point of view. I bristled every time another paragraph started up with "When one is ..." or "When you are ..." followed by a present-tense description of what happens when the mind wanders and boys imagine zombie attacks, etc. It would have been better if it had simply continued on with third person past tense.

I also didn't quite care for the protagonist's propensity for coming up with possible book titles. The titles felt inane and useless. In addition, the book seemed to have an undercurrent of religious disbelief (mocking religion by pointing to a farcical character who clings to prophecies from the apocryphal Book of Enoch and is prompted to commit a heinous act). I couldn't get behind any of the characters and never felt invested in the story, yet I read on wanting to know whether or not the missing boy was found.

Where Things Come Back tells the story of a young teenager whose fifteen-year-old brother goes missing one day. The whole town seems more absorbed with the possible reappearance of an extinct woodpecker than with solving the mystery of Gabriel Witter's strange disappearance. The chapters weave back and forth between describing the despair of Cullen Witter and the fanaticism of Benton Sage (would-be-missionary) and Cabot Searcy (Book of Enoch devotee). Eventually the two parallel tales converge in one tragic event that explains where the plot has been heading all along.

The book received both the ALA's William C. Morris Debut Award and the Michael L. Printz /Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. Obviously, other readers held a far higher opinion of the book. With few male-oriented YA novels available, I'm glad the author managed to secure these awards, but I doubt I'll recommend the title to any young male readers I know. I would actually recommend the other Whaley book I read for book club last year, Highly Illogical Behavior. That was a far better reading experience.

The cover above is the one on the library copy I read. I much prefer the second cover because of the rich blue and the words etched in the background of the bird.