From the Edge of the World. David L. Carter

Expelled from school and without a friend, young Victor Flowers is sent by a mother at her wit’s end to spend a summer with his paternal grandmother and work in a family restaurant on the North Carolina coast. As if in spite of himself, Victor finds himself unexpectedly swept up into the concerns of this barely remembered branch of his family; his flinty but welcoming grandmother, his ambitious, intelligent, and indomitable cousin Shelby, and his meek Uncle Buzz, whose health is failing fast. Through coming to care for these strangers who are his kin, Victor comes also to a burgeoning understanding of some complex family dynamics that help to at once explain and dispel his sense of himself as having no real future. From the Edge of the World is the story of Victor’s confrontation with—and acceptance of— his beginnings.