SMALL TOWN SINS: A NOVEL
KEN JAWOROWSKI
© 2023 Henry Holt
$27.99
272 pages

Nathan Stoltz was the kind of guy that other people rarely noticed.

An only child, he'd always lived on the edge of life: though people in Locksburg, Pennsylvania, knew him, they didn't see him, and that was fine. It gave Nathan a lot of leeway, and he got away with things like stealing and hocking his mother's wedding ring to pay for an abortion for a girl he slept with exactly once.

He lived with guilt for that for a long time. When he met and married Paula, he still felt bad, but he never told her about it, because they had enough problems. When he found a bag of money in a burning house while he was saving a man's life, he wanted to keep that quiet, too. He just figured the cosmos had finally forgiven him.

Callie, a co-worker of Paula's at the local hospital, knew Paula had something on her mind — but then, so did Callie. A teenage girl came to the hospital one evening with advanced cancer, and her fundamentalist parents were ignoring what their daughter wanted. The girl told Callie that she hoped to see the ocean before she died.

Callie had many medical issues as a child, and it literally scarred her. She knew what it was like to have dreams unfulfilled. And so she devised an audacious scheme...

Not long before the teenager was admitted, around the time a badly burned man came to the hospital, Andy lost his daughter to a Down syndrome—related disease, and his wife to an overdose. Everything he ever loved was gone, and he wanted to join them in death — until he found a purpose that almost killed him.

How would your life change if a couple million bucks landed in your lap? That's the stuff of dreams — or nightmares, or stories like Small Town Sins.

You can just imagine a tiny community like Locksburg; you might even know one, although author Ken Jaworowski doesn't dwell on the town itself. Just know it's the dying kind of place people move to but not from. It's the kind of a place where dreams go to lie down before they die — which might sound dreadfully depressing, but it's really not.

Happily, Jaworowski's characters keep this tale from becoming a drudge; they're genuinely likable people who do surprising, sometimes funny, sometimes stupid, sometimes heartbreaking things, and your emotions will get a workout.

If your book club can handle a bit of profanity, this is a novel that will really spark discussion.