Where Things Come Back

Author: John Corey Whaley

Number of Pages: 256

The main theme in the novel I am reading is that some things don‘t come back (like Cullen’s cousin Oslo who died), and some things may come back like Cullen’s brother Gabriel who disappeared, or the extinct Lazarus woodpecker. This novel has two story lines resulting in more than one theme, and some of them are faith and family. Benton the young missionary losses his faith and tries his best to find it again. On the other side Cullen and his family are very upset after Gabriel’s disappearance and Cullen is trying to keep his family together. Here are two examples of the theme, “This would all be true if the bird existed, which it didn’t”, and “The bird existed in the 1940s, but not in Lily, Arkansas.”