The Boomerang Kid

“More ably than most any contemporary queer writer, Jay Quinn is crafting novels that neatly integrate gay lives with straight lives. Rich and profound.” —Richard Labonte for Book Marks on The Beloved Son

Maura Donovan Ostryder is coming into her own professionally and privately as she begins her fifty-first year. Maura has always been the master of her own life and has reared her son Kai to be the same. Unfortunately, life—and especially motherhood—hasn’t been as easily managed as Maura would have planned when she became pregnant.

Named for the Hawaiian word for “sea,” Kai Michael Ostryder, at twenty-seven, is both charming and remote; he has struggled with bipolar disorder from the time he was a child. Creative, dreamy, and utterly impractical, he has a long history of going off the medications that barely control his mental stability and then self-medicating with illegal drugs. As he comes home to Maura, he has spent most of his money on a month’s supply of the opiate painkiller Oxycontin. He’s fled his complicated emotional attachments to a young man and a young woman, with plans to wean himself off the drug, return to treatment for his bipolar disorder, and get his life back on track from the comfort of “home.”

Exploring issues of motherhood, addiction, and sexual identity, Jay Quinn continues to bring to vivid life the emotional drama of the modern-day family.

Jay Quinn is also the author of Back Where He Started, The Good Neighbor, and The Beloved Son.