Lonely Boy (The Wayward Son)

This first book in The Wayward Son series is about a boy growing up in the small farm town of Willows, CA, raised by a hard-working family with good morals. This is him trying to fit in and find his place in a social group, the way he found attention in misbehavior that led to greater and greater acts of defiance culminating in him running away from home and discovering life on the streets. This leads to Juvenile Hall, Group Homes, Boot Camps, and eventually the California Youth Authority. Spending his formative years in some of the most vicious youth prisons in the Youth Authority led to a search for coping strategies that led him deeper and deeper down the wrong path of criminality, violence, and self-harm.
An inside look at the criminal justice system and how our youth can easily get lost in the system and become something that they never were before. A look at the "Gladiator" School of Hard Knocks that the California Youth Authority was and how it could weaponize a smalltown boy and infect him with criminality. The lengths that one would go to as a teenager locked away from society to seek any semblance of normalcy and finding ways to deal with life in ever increasing negative norms until his entire worldview is changed. The ways he dealt with the fear and the anguish and the long nights and came out on the other side a fundamentally changed man, hardened by a lost youth that forced him to adapt and overcome at a moment's notice, or end up a victim again.
This is a boy's journey to find himself, to find belonging, and to never be Lonely again, for in a world of mass incarceration and concrete, it's easier than ever to find yourself out on that island.