"That's what happened in Lily. People dreamed. People left. And they all came back. It was like Arkansas's version of a black hole; nothing could escape it."

I originally picked this book up because I had the ambitious project of reading all the Printz winners. To be honest, the concept of a book about the sighting of an extinct woodpecker in a nowhere town in Arkansas didn't really pull me in and I never got around to reading it. Flash forward to this week, when I had to read it for my Young Adult Lit class and had a hell of a time putting it down. This book truly surprised me. I love young adult lit and read a great deal of it but it's pretty rare to find a book that deals with death, the ways in which people cope with guilt and loss and basic human interaction and does it in a compelling and often humorous way. It's only peripherally about a bird and largely about how people handle life and all the curveballs it throws.

The basic story of Where Things Come Back is about a teen named Cullen Witter living in Lily, a dead-end Arkansas town, and the disappearance of Cullen's younger brother, Gabriel. Lily is one of those small towns that has almost nothing going for it and yet somehow seems to draw people back in no matter how hard they try to escape it. Just before Cullen's brother disappears, Lily suddenly makes national news as a birdwatcher announces that he has caught sight of a woodpecker previously thought to be extinct. The entire town is thrown into a fever at the thought of the bird revitalizing Lily and granting a second chance to its citizens. Cullen on the other hand, doesn't care about the bird, he just wants his brother back. As John Corey Whaley draws the reader through Cullen and his family's struggles to maintain normality as they try to maintain hope that Gabriel will come back and isn't lying dead in a ditch somewhere, another story is introduced. This story deals with the struggles of a young missionary trying to understand his place in the world and as the book progresses, Whaley gradually and skillfully ties the two stories together with the connections only being fully understood in the last few chapters. It's a very well written mystery and character study that manages to be compelling for all that it isn't particularly action-packed.

"My cynicism had been known, from time to time, to get me into accidental trouble. I was especially cynical in groups, perhaps feeling that a witty cut-down about a stranger would earn me the respect and admiration of friends. This rarely worked. You can only act like a jerk so many times before people stop listening to you."

In a number of ways, Cullen reminded me of Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye. Cullen is alternately cynical and idealistic, with a somewhat dismissive view of most people. He's not particularly great with people but he is a great observer of them. He's always entertaining himself thinking of possible scenarios and part of the humor throughout the book comes from the possible book titles that come to him via entertaining conversations or situations. No character in Where Things Come Back is perfect or even particularly close. They're all complex, complicated bundles of good and bad, nerves and compassion, and they feel intensely real for it.

Sometimes, it seems like Printz winners are books that librarians feel that teens should read rather than ones they are likely to enjoy. I think Where Things Come Back straddles that line incredibly well. Whaley creates a story with a number of complex people that interact with each other in surprising, not always good ways. But they feel like real people, not just impossible figments of wish fulfillment. And the mystery of Gabriel's disappearance and his ties to the young missionary help to drive the story forward and keep the reader interested despite its slow build. It's not a book I'd recommend to every teen but it deserved to win the award for its brilliant handling of human nature and I think would be a great read for more introspective teens. I certainly loved it.