John Corey Whaley

In the remarkable, bizarre, and heart-wrenching summer before Cullen Witter’s senior year of high school, he is forced to examine everything he thinks he understands about his small and painfully dull Arkansas town. His cousin overdoses; his town becomes absurdly obsessed with the alleged reappearance of an extinct woodpecker; and most troubling of all, his sensitive, gifted fifteen-year-old brother, Gabriel, suddenly and inexplicably disappears.
Meanwhile, the crisis of faith spawned by a young missionary’s disillusion in Africa prompts a frantic search for meaning that has far-reaching consequences. As distant as the two stories initially seem, they are woven together through masterful plotting and merge in a surprising and harrowing climax.
This extraordinary tale from a rare literary voice finds wonder in the ordinary and illuminates the hope of second chances.… (more)

If this hadn't won the Printz, I don't know if I would've finished it, but I'm certainly glad I did because things got more interesting as the book went along. (And I've heard it's even better on a second reading.)

My favorite parts were not the main story about the Witter brothers in small-town Arkansas, but the B story about a young missionary's crisis of faith and its subsequent affect on his otherwise average college roommate.

There was something [b:Catcher in the Rye|5107|The Catcher in the Rye|J.D. Salinger|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1329189899s/5107.jpg|3036731]-esque about Cullen's teenage malaise, which I think will have huge appeal for teenagers (duh). As a 29-year-old woman, I'm not the target audience for this kind of stuff, so take it with a grain of salt when I say that Cullen's zombie fantasies and talking about himself in the third person mostly bored me.

But, overall, I liked it. I'm excited to see what Whaley writes next and I congratulate him on a very promising debut.… (more)