Where Things Come Back Themes

Even though our seventeen-year-old narrator may be loath to admit that he has all the warm and fuzzy feelings about his family, Cullen really is attached to his family in Where Things Come Back. He...

They say one is the loneliest number… At the beginning of Where Things Come Back, Cullen Witter presents himself as somewhat of a lone wolf—he doesn't have that many friends outside of his brot...

Hallelujah—the Judeo-Christian God is all over the pages of Where Things Come Back. From Benton Sage, a young missionary who winds up committing suicide, to his roommate, Cabot, who finds the Boo...

Talk about flights of fancy: Not everyone in Where Things Come Back has their feet firmly planted in reality. Benton and Cabot, for example, both get caught-up in their own religious fantasies, tho...

Spoiler alert: Where Things Come Back isn't exactly a happy, go-lucky tale. The book starts off with Cullen staring down at the body of his dead cousin, and things don't improve much from there. Hi...

There's a lot of love going around in Where Things Come Back—brotherly love, familial love, romantic love, and even friend love (or bromance, if you will). Cullen may be watching his life fall ap...

Because Where Things Come Back starts off with the narrator staring down at a dead body, the possibility of death and grief is always hanging over Cullen's head. It's a pretty grim idea to think of...

It's summertime in Lily, and sex is in the air. Since we've got ourselves a hot-blooded teenage boy as our narrator in Where Things Come Back, it makes sense that we get a lot of insight into Culle...

When Where Things Come Back opens up, Cullen, his brother, and their friends are all in that in-between phase between childhood and adulthood, some itching to leave their small town in Arkansas and...

The small town blues are a real thing, so even though community and family are both strong in Lily, many characters in Where Things Come Back are living in painful loneliness. Cullen and his friend...