The Boy Who Could Never Die

Everybody gets one person who teaches them how to be brave. Scott got one summer. For fifteen-year-old Scott, the city is a labyrinth - and his own house is the hardest maze in it. His father was once the kindest man in the building, until one funeral handed him a bottle he never put down. His mother stopped fighting years ago. Scott has learned to be a ghost. Then he is sent away for the summer to his grandparents' Missouri farm, expecting exile - and finds an untamed land, a family that keeps its word, and his cousin Allen: brave, reckless, and seemingly indestructible. The boy who could never die. Under their grandfather's quiet hands, the boys haul hay against a coming storm, raise walls, and coax a dead tractor back to life. But the summer has harder lessons waiting: a bully who owns the county fair midway, a father who runs from his own fires, a cave that swallows the light - and, deep in a ravine the locals call the Devil's Throat, where the old men swear the river keeps what it takes, a discovery that will demand more courage than either boy knew he had. Twenty-two years later, Scott tells the whole truth of it: the phone call that split his life into before and after, the dark years he almost didn't come back from, and the slow way home - to the farm, to a woman who had been watching him since a county fair, and to the answer his cousin left behind: be someone worth missing. The Boy Who Could Never Die is a clean, heartfelt coming-of-age novel about brotherhood, grief, and the people who build us. Perfect for readers who loved Ordinary Grace, A Painted House, and Peace Like a River - and for anyone who ever had one person who made them braver.

Pages: 207, Paperback, Independently published