Following the loss of his mother, fifteen-year-old Will Douglas is on a self-destructive path to nowhere, and as fate would have it, that’s exactly where he’s heading. Will’s father ships him off to a Southern Baptist boys home in the middle of Nowhere, Mississippi—a stretch of hostile backcountry, populated by duct-taped trailers and backward beliefs.

Surrounded by teenage castoffs and criminals, Will must survive the next 90 days under the iron-fisted rule of Brother Bennett, “a man of firm discipline and faith.” However, as Will soon discovers, Brother Bennett’s modes of discipline are even more extreme than his beliefs. Licks and yuckings become a part of his everyday life, and after Brother Bennett dishes out the most brutal beating he has ever witnessed, Will decides he has to find a way out of Nowhere, for the sake of his own safety.

But nothing in Nowhere is ever that simple, and instead of finding a way out, Will finds himself falling for a girl he meets at church. Being around her feels like being somewhere else, like being someone else. But seeing her means breaking Brother Bennett’s rules. All he has to do is keep his head down and make it through the rest of his sentence, but some things are simply worth the risk, even if it means staying in the last place he wants to be.

Set in the spring of 1990 and based on true events, Nowhere, Mississippi is an in-your-face coming of age novel that opens a door into the violence and corruption of private reform schools throughout the United States.

Paul Munro