Paper Castles

Book excerpt: Foreclosures are hitting record highs; unemployment is skyrocketing, and the economy is in shambles. Equally broke and futureless, 28-year-old James Brooke, a graduate architect, coffee-addict, and self-described average nobody has returned to his small hometown in West Ohio. Torn between his fanciful dreams and the need to pay off bills, he struggles to find his own identity while facing a harder-than-ever reality. But living under his father's rooftop while keeping his head in the clouds soon turns out to be a bad combination, and the mounting student debt forces him to settle for any job he can find. That's when he stumbles across a new coffee shop, a wayward girl with a talent for storytelling, and his own unresolved past. This unexpected set of things could help him figure out what his place in the world is-if that place even exists. Paper Castles is a story about the search for meaning in times when everything seems meaningless.