Where Things Come Back 

by John Corey Whaley

It’s a small town in Arkansas named Lily in which the townspeople get hyped about a sighting of a Lazarus woodpecker, thought to be extinct, and in which a teenage brother mysteriously disappears. It’s a place described as “some nothing town where, as its seemed, things could come back from the dead, mistakes could be rectified, lives could be started over.” (p. 207). Told mostly from the point of view of Cullen Witter, a seventeen-year old boy, who in the opening scene of the book describes the first dead person he ever saw and then describes the second dead person, his cousin Oslo.

The characters in the story weave in and out of each other’s lives, some of them connecting peripherally, but they are all interesting and all key to the story. The story is told in a non-linear fashion, going back and forth in time and it seems to zoom in and out of the characters’ lives.

I found myself wanting to figure out the way the people, places, and names of people and places are most obviously connected and how those connections relate to the book’s theme. It’s that kind of book. I have my theories. You will probably have yours. It would all be open to debate.

Whaley, J. C. (2011). Where things come back. New York, NY: Atheneum Books.