By Greg Howard
Riley is eleven, gay, and certain the magical Whispers can grant wishes, so he sets out to trade them a tribute for the one thing he wants back: his mother, who vanished four months ago.
Riley's mom disappeared four months ago, and the detective on the case has run out of leads. So Riley decides to find her himself. His mother always loved the story of the Whispers, magical creatures who grant one wish to anyone who leaves the right tribute, and Riley believes in them completely. With his best friend Gary and his old dog, he heads into the woods to find them and ask for her back. Riley is gay, something he mostly keeps to himself in a small Southern town where boys who like boys get noticed and picked on. As the search goes on, the real story of what happened to his mother comes clear, slowly and hard.
This looks like a magical quest and turns out to be a story about grief, and that turn is what makes it land. Riley believes in the Whispers so hard that you go along with him, right up until the human truth arrives. Howard writes a gay Southern boyhood with a lot of tenderness and a lot of humor, so it's funny well before it's sad. It's a heavy book under the adventure. I'd hand it to a child who can take a sad ending and stay nearby for the last chapters.