Books For Bad Kids

The characters of When You’re Dead and Gone —

A little over a year after Lane overdoses on bedroom floor, Kieran steals his ashes and takes his friends on a wild goose chase across the western United States. In Caleb and Vanya’s eyes, friendship, romance, and loss culminate on one big, unexpected roadtrip. As they face addiction recovery and grief, they find the aliens within themselves, how small they are against the stars, and how far they will go for one another when it all goes dark.

Favorite pics with When You’re Dead and Gone, which is officially OUT, as of the main character’s death day: June 27.

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A month before his eighteenth birthday, Lane Winters overdoses on his bedroom floor.

A year after his death, his boyfriend Kieran steals his ashes, intent upon taking Lane to all the places they promised each other they would go.

Caleb Winters spent the last year caring for his grieving mother and coping with his brother's death by holding onto his sobriety with both hands. He's not prepared to move back to Denver and face the people he left behind, and he'd rather rot in bed and watch tapes on VCR than speak to his father. When he has to chase after Kieran, he's ready to explode, but seeing Vanya again is something else. Love, maybe? Fuck.

Vanya Nilsson had something very bad happen to her. She's had a lot of bad things happen to her, but in the last year, she's become more herself than she knew possible. Leave it to Caleb Winters to throw it all into chaos — he's back in Denver for less than an hour, and she'd follow him to the moon. A roadtrip together with their friends seems like magic, the way it was before Lane died.

The roadtrip of a lifetime:

Driving across the western United States, they must save Lane's ashes before something happens to him.

Maybe, just maybe, they need to save more than Lane, but Kieran — and themselves, too.

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