Whereabouts

Set in the deep South of the 1970s, Whereabouts is the powerful coming-of-age story of an independent teenager who desperately longs to flee her small, claustrophobic hometown following the unexpected death of her father and her mother's sudden remarriage to the local funeral director. As she attempts to map a new course for her young life, Missy's search is constantly derailed by the men she encounters-the mortician stepfather with a penchant for chilly women, a much older third cousin who offers to drive her aimlessly in his dusty pickup (for a steep, perhaps tragic price), the quirky owner of an all-but-abandoned roadside motel, and a pair of mismatched AWOL Marines from Parris Island. From cheap campgrounds to roadside bars, to the cracked Formica counter of a crumbling pancake house, Missy Belue wanders the back roads of a forgotten South, looking for a safe place to land, earning fresh scar tissue from the confusing, complicated world outside her hometown. In Whereabouts, award-winning writer Scott Gould lyrically weaves a tale of escape and redemption and, ultimately, of how love somehow survives, no matter the twisting paths it travels.