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Billy by Laura Roybal5/12/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() While most children avoid the horror of being kidnapped, nearly everyone goes through a period when they ponder their real selves, and this book speaks to that confusion. Roybal has written a sensitive novel about the problems teenagers can have trying to satisfy multiple identities. When Bobby commits suicide a few months before graduation, Billy travels back to the town he called home and begins the painful process of stitching the two halves of his life together. He deals with his sense of displacement by writing imaginary and real letters to his friend Bobby back in New Mexico, who has a special understanding of what it’s like to belong to two families due to his array of stepparents and stepsiblings. Billy returns to his old life in the Midwest, but, of course, you can never really go home again. Five years later, everything changes again when he gets picked up by the police, who run his fingerprints and discover Billy has been reported missing for years. A boy on the cusp of adulthood confronts his split childhood and finds a sense of balance between his two families, his two cultures and his two languages.īilly’s life changed drastically when his biological father kidnapped him from his adoptive family at the age of ten and whisked him away to New Mexico to live a life of rodeos, pickup trucks and rifles. ![]()
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