Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley

Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley
228 pages
Winner of the William C. Morris Dubut Award from ALA

Cullen, living in Lily, a small Arkansas town, is seeing zombies. Not just any zombies. The zombie of his brother that turned up missing.  At first the town frantically looks for the fifteen-year-old, but the searches die down, and Cullen's family is left to wonder. Did he run away, is he dead, was he kidnapped. But Cullen knows his brother would never leave him, he knows he is out there somwhere.
The town's new obsession is the Lazarus woodpecker, thought to be extinct in the 1940's.  The bird has supposedly been spotted in Lily. And this might just be what the town needs to be resurrected. But if everyone is crazed about the bird, who is left to wonder and be grieved by the missing Gabriel.

Such a well written novel, full of hope and sadness intertwined. The stories twist and turn around each other, falling neatly in place for an ending so surprising that even after finishing it, you still don't want to put it down.