The Summer of Shooting Stars

It is the summer of 1989—but not the summer you remember. This is the summer of shooting stars, when every evening the Ohio sky blazes with hundreds of meteors burning high in the atmosphere, a season that begins in wonder and ends in terror.

Fourteen-year-old Hustle spends his days with his best friend Dmitri, peering through neighbors’ windows, hanging around the record store on Lee Road, and hammering fossil trilobites from the shale in the park. At home, his older brother Tommy—Hustle’s hero—has begun slipping deeper into trouble, though Hustle cannot understand why. Meanwhile, their father, an immigrant from wartime Germany, works alone in the garage, meticulously building an extraordinary birdhouse: a perfect replica of the home destroyed in his bombed-out childhood.

Then Tommy disappears.

When a strange young man with wet lips and bright red hair begins appearing at the house, asking unsettling questions, Hustle becomes convinced that Tommy is in real danger. Desperate to bring his brother home and keep his family from coming apart, Hustle sets out to find him. But where has Tommy gone—and what secret life has he been trying to escape?

As the meteors begin striking the earth and the summer sky grows increasingly violent, Hustle is forced toward truths about family, love, and betrayal that he may not be ready to face.