Wrecker: A Novel

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Bloomsbury Publishing USA, Feb 20, 2011 - Fiction - 290 pages

After foster-parenting four young siblings a decade ago, Summer Wood tried to imagine a place where kids who are left alone or taken from their families would find the love and the family they deserve. For her, fiction was the tool to realize that world, and Wrecker, the central character in her second novel, is the abandoned child for whom life turns around in most unexpected ways. It's June of 1965 when Wrecker enters the world. The war is raging in Vietnam, San Francisco is tripping toward flower power, and Lisa Fay, Wrecker's birth mother, is knocked nearly sideways by life as a single parent in a city she can barely manage to navigate on her own. Three years later, she's in prison, and Wrecker is left to bounce around in the system before he's shipped off to live with distant relatives in the wilds of Humboldt County, California. When he arrives he's scared and angry, exploding at the least thing, and quick to flee. Wrecker is the story of this boy and the motley group of isolated eccentrics who come together to raise him and become a family along the way.
For readers taken with the special boy at the center of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, Wrecker will be a welcome companion.

 

Contents

Section 1
3
Section 2
30
Section 3
59
Section 4
72
Section 5
97
Section 6
121
Section 7
139
Section 8
161
Section 9
186
Section 10
192
Section 11
215
Section 12
231
Section 13
246
Section 14
273
Section 15
289
Copyright

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About the author (2011)

Summer Wood is the author of Arroyo. In 2007 she was awarded the Literary Gift of Freedom from A Room of Her Own Foundation for her work on Wrecker. She teaches writing for the University of New Mexico's Taos Summer Writer's Conference and in 2009 directed the first annual NEA/Taos Big Read. She is currently the director of the Young Writers' Mentorship Program and has lived in Taos for the past 20 years.

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