Inside one of America’s most troubled periods of economic crisis, The Road From Nowhere, from master storyteller and Newbery medalist Avi, is both a tightly plotted adventure and a big-hearted tale of boyhood that explores what it means to put a name to the feelings we’re taught to push down far into the earth.

There’s one road in Gatchett’s Gluch—population forty-five—a silver mining town in the high Colorado desert. That means there’s only one way in and one way out.

Fourteen-year-old Ollie feels trapped and restless, desperate to find his own lode of silver, so he can gain riches and get his family out of the town. As the man of the house, he feels that’s his job, just as his younger brother Gus’s job is to ask question after question. Though Ollie is unwilling to admit it, he doesn’t have all the answers. He can’t even read, unlike Alys, the only girl and only friend he has outside of Gus.

Meanwhile, a man who calls himself a geologist has arrived in town. Not only can he read books, he can read rocks, the first person that Ollie has ever seen who looks at rocks with fascination, not desperation. Most important, he knows how to stake a silver claim. So when Ollie, Gus, and Alys stumble upon a cave rich with silver and form a friendship with that geologist, the future suddenly looks good. The problem: Elijah Gatchett runs the Gulch and claims all its silver. Men have been kicked out—or shot at—for seeking it on their own. But for the kids, the only thing worse than their families staying under Gatchett’s thumb is getting run out of town with not so much as a penny in their pockets.

The kids are desperate to find an answer. It may lay in that dark cave. How Ollie, Gus, and Alys navigate all this—with a surprising ending—is an old-west adventure that has never been told before.