Where Things Come Back – John Corey Whaley
Just when
seventeen-year-old Cullen Witter thinks he understands everything about his
small and painfully dull Arkansas town, it all disappears. . . .
In the summer before Cullen's senior year, a nominally-depressed birdwatcher
named John Barling thinks he spots a species of woodpecker thought to be
extinct since the 1940s in Lily, Arkansas. His rediscovery of the so-called
Lazarus Woodpecker sparks a flurry of press and woodpecker-mania. Soon all the
kids are getting woodpecker haircuts and everyone's eating "Lazarus
burgers." But as absurd as the town's carnival atmosphere has become,
nothing is more startling than the realization that Cullen’s sensitive, gifted
fifteen-year-old brother Gabriel has suddenly and inexplicably disappeared.
While Cullen navigates his way through a summer of finding and losing love,
holding his fragile family together, and muddling his way into adulthood, a
young missionary in Africa, who has lost his faith, is searching for any
semblance of meaning wherever he can find it. As distant as the two stories
seem at the start, they are thoughtfully woven ever closer together and through
masterful plotting, brought face-to-face in a surprising and harrowing climax.
Review: I don’t think I got along with this book very well. It’s definitely
not a bad book, but I don’t think it’s my kind of thing.
This book has
four plotlines that come together at the end. In the first story,
seventeen-year-old Cullen’s brother goes missing, and his family starts to fall
apart.
In a second
plotline, a birdwatcher thinks he spotted an extinct species of woodpecker in
Cullen’s town. The town is flooded by tourists looking for the bird.
In the third
plotline, two religious college students learn about a little-known book of the
Bible. The information they discover changes the course of both their lives.
In another
plotline, a girl who graduated from Cullen’s high school comes back to their
small town after a failed relationship.
The plotlines
converge slowly, which I really liked. At first, the plots seem to have nothing
to do with each other, but as the book goes on, they come closer and closer
together. Eventually, the way that the stories were related clicked in my mind.
I needed to keep reading to find out if I was right. I liked the last 50 pages
of the book much better than the rest of it. The story starts moving fast when
the plotlines come together. I sped through the ending because I wanted to find
out if Cullen got his brother back.
The writing
style is the biggest reason that I struggled with this book. The best way that I
can describe it is “detached.” The detachment does help avoid melodrama (which
is great), but I never felt close to the characters. I was interested in the
mystery of Cullen’s brother’s disappearance, but I didn’t really care about the
outcome of the mystery because I couldn’t connect with anyone involved in it.
I also struggled
with Cullen’s narration style. It starts to feel repetitive as the book goes
on. He often talks about himself in third person and has elaborate fantasies. Some
of the fantasies are about killing zombies. I understand how the zombies tie in
to the theme (zombies are “things that come back”), but I think the fantasies
take up too much of the book. I was tempted to skim a lot of the parts that are
about Cullen’s imagination.
Other than the
ending, there is one other part of the book that I really like. At one point,
Cullen’s family hires a psychic to find his missing brother. The family members’
mixed reactions to the psychic feel realistic. Some family members want to give
the psychic a chance, and others roll their eyes, but they are all very
invested in what the psychic says.
Overall, this book wasn’t
for me, but there are parts of it that I really liked.
