Whenever You Are
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Aug 4, 2026
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- $10.99
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- Pre-Order
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
What if changing the biggest mistake of your life would be the biggest mistake of your life?
Two teens in juvenile detention may have found a way to free themselves — not just from their cells, but from the mistakes that got them locked up in the first place.
Clem is a would-be poet who has been in “training school” ever since he caused the accident that maimed the nice lady who says she only wants him to do something fine with his life. But how, when even his parents have given up on him?
Then Clem meets Finn, whose history is even more traumatic. Clem tries to help Finn adjust to detention, but when the boys are placed in solitary confinement, euphemistically called “administrative segregation,” Finn deteriorates, both physically and mentally. He’s ranting, saying he’s found a portal in his cell and a way to change their lives — past, present and future.
And then he disappears.
Clem is interrogated by detention officials, a social worker, a doctor and a mysterious man in a suit, who ask him about the days leading up to Finn’s disappearance. As he tells them the story, he puzzles over what really happened to Finn, and the unexpected clues he's left Clem to find a better future.
Key Text Features
afterword
author’s note
biographical note
dialogue
epigraph
poems
scientific nomenclature
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Leavitt (Buffalo Flats) incorporates light speculative elements into a fresh contemporary tale about an incarcerated teen finding hope after a traumatic event. Fifteen-year-old Clemence Todd, who longs to do "Something Fine" upon his eventual release from juvenile detention, wonders about becoming a poet ("words belong to everyone,/ even the messed up and the mixed up"). When he confronts a security officer depriving fellow detainees of medical care, Clem and his only friend, physics-loving Finnegan Kelly, are each punished with separate solitary confinement. On a rare yard break, Finn informs Clem that his cell harbors a wormhole to the past that will enable Finn to change their futures. Skeptical, Clem suspects that solitary confinement has caused Finn to hallucinate—until Finn abruptly vanishes. Sharp-eyed prose relays Clem's testimony to prison administrators and a mysterious investigator following Finn's disappearance, while Clem's affecting, stream-of-consciousness verse chronicles events leading up to the present. Quick pacing and an unforgettable voice balance bleak descriptions of prison abuse and Clem's earnest, relatable pining for a dog, a girlfriend, and a better life. It's an affirming, intrigue-packed offering that closes with a delightful spark of ambiguity, a fitting resolution for a work that suggests that "knowing everything is boring." Ages 14–up.
