The Road From Nowhere

Inside one of America’s most troubled periods of economic crisis, The Road From Nowhere, from master storyteller and Newbery medalist Avi, is both a tightly plotted adventure and a big-hearted tale of boyhood that explores what it means to put a name to the feelings we’re taught to push down far into the earth.

There’s one road in Gatchett’s Gluch—population forty-five—a silver mining town in the high Colorado desert. That means there’s only one way in and one way out.

Fourteen-year-old Olli...