Dead Boy

An average Tuesday morning. Sitting in his usual seat at the back of the classroom, an average 11-year-old, Cody Roy, hears firecrackers down the hallway. But they're not firecrackers--an active shooter is stalking the school hallways. Cody and a girl his age from another classroom make their escape out a window. Panicked, they run from the school, charging headlong through the adjacent cornfields to Cody's secret hideout—the Far Away Place--a hidden oasis in the middle of the vast surrounding farmland. They hunker down there, pretending the terrible Tuesday never happened, pretending they're just two kids playing hooky on a lazy spring day in an idyll paradise. Until reality creeps back in. While it's growing dark, the pair make their way homeward. It's in the immediate aftermath of tragedy that Cody discovers life as he knew it has altered forever; the school shooter was no random stranger. The one saving grace for Cody is that the girl whose name he doesn't even know is now a part of his life. The girl's name is Astrid. She's not average. And she has her own story to tell. ***** An ultimately uplifting adult novel in the child-narrator tradition of ROOM by Emma Donoghue, THE LOVELY BONES by Alice Sebold and A HOUSE OF LIGHT AND STONE by E.J. Runyon *****