The Last Good Summer: A Novel of Boyhood and Consequences (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798247094104)

Two boys. One summer. A man the whole town wants to forget.

It's the summer of 1994 in a small river town along the Mississippi Delta, and Evan Cole and Micah Ruiz have nothing ahead of them but heat, water, and time. Evan comes from a family that looks fine from outside. Micah is being raised by a grandmother who loves him but is running out of strength. They are fourteen and fifteen, best friends in the way that only boys who've shared silence on a riverbank can be.

When they stumble into a convenience store altercation and stand up for a man no one else will defend, they don't know what they're starting. The man is Eli Greer-a Gulf War veteran living in an abandoned school bus near the county landfill. He has a disability check and over a hundred thousand dollars in the bank. What he doesn't have is a reason to rejoin the world.

The boys bring him food. They bring him to their island. They bring him back into the orbit of human connection. But when a county official begins maneuvering to seize control of Eli's finances, and the adults in the boys' lives demand they stay away, Evan and Micah face a question no one their age should have to answer: What do you owe someone who could save himself-but won't?

The Last Good Summer is a novel about moral courage at an age when courage has no name for itself. It is about the distance between safety and meaning, between obedience and conscience, between the summer you expected and the one that changes everything.

For readers of Stand by Me, Where the Crawdads Sing, and the film Mud. For anyone who remembers what it felt like to be young enough to act and old enough to know it mattered.