The Many Half-Lived Lives of Sam Sylvester

Sam Sylvester is a nonbinary, autistic teenager who moves with their father to a small Oregon town to start over after surviving a violent hate crime in Montana. The new house comes with a strange inheritance: the unsolved death of a teenage boy who lived in Sam's room thirty years earlier. As Sam builds a circle of friends and a tentative first relationship, they begin digging into the cold case while facing the trauma they carried west. The novel braids a mystery through a tender, careful coming-of-age story about learning to feel safe again.