Set amid the giant trees of northern California’s magical Lost Coast, Wrecker is the story of a nearly broken boy who unexpectedly finds a family.
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.
“[An] affecting novel… Wood succeeds with surefooted prose; a lush, earthy California backdrop; and a sensitive story of nurturing and family.” —Publishers Weekly
“Wood moves her characters gracefully through trying times, both cultural and personal.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Summer Wood’s remarkable novel carves its way, sentence by gorgeous sentence, into the great complexity of love and family and community. Her dialogue is so natural and full we feel as though we are illicitly eavesdropping on these complex, flawed, and full-hearted characters. Wrecker is a tender, stunning novel.” — Meredith Hall, author of Without a Map
photo credit: Miriam Berkley
About Summer Wood
Summer Wood is the author of WRECKER, due out from Bloomsbury in February 2011. Her first novel, Arroyo, was published in 2001 by Chronicle Books. She lives in Taos, New Mexico, and writes a blog at www.thewhereofit.com.
Hardcover: 304 pages