Cullen Witter lived in the rather unremarkable small town of Lily, Arkansas. He has a fairly normal teenage life, with a boisterous best friend, little brother he loves, and a crush on a girl he's never spoken to. But Lily is thrown into a loop when someone spots an extinct woodpecker, and around the same time Gabriel, his brother, disappears. 
 Cullen is highly introspective. There are always people around him (his best friend even started sleeping on his floor when Gabriel disappeared), but his imagination has a tendency to run away with him. Because of this, you often can't tell the difference between what's going on and what he's imagining. Though I wonder if he understands the difference himself. 
 At the same time there's the separate tale of Benton Sage, a teenage missionary in Ethiopia. You know these two stories are going to be connected somehow, eventually, and I usually love stories like this but the interwoven storyline just didn't... fit. In fact, Benton himself is irrelevant and I wonder why he was introduced at all. 
 But Cullen's story is charming. He tries to be an angst-ridden teenager, though it's not his nature. He resents the tourists in town because of the "stupid woodpecker," and he hates that people coddle him because of his missing brother. He doesn't try to be a hero; he has enough issues of his own. And that's why, deep down, you understand the need to coddle and protect him.