The Road to Wherever

Book excerpt: A middle grade road novel about a boy stuck on a summer trip with his offbeat auto-mechanic cousins—a humor- and heart-filled journey that leads the boy to an unexpected confrontation with some broken-down parts of himself. After eleven-year-old June Ball’s dad disappears without so much as a goodbye note, June’s mother sends him on the road with his adult cousins, mechanics Thomas and Cornell Ball. The Balls are “Ford Men”; their calling in life is to restore old Ford cars—and only Ford cars—that no longer run. And so begins a summer traveling the highways and byways of America, encountering busted-up Fairlanes, Thunderbirds, and Rancheros. They also encounter the cars’ owners, who sometimes need fixing up, too. June doesn’t understand his cousins’ passion for all things Ford. But at every turn, June realizes that this journey is about more than giving neglected classic cars some much-needed TLC—there’s room to care for the broken parts of humans, too. A story of adventure, longing, and growing up from adult novelist, journalist, and All-SEC center for the LSU Tigers, John Ed Bradley.