LAUREL

Seventeen-year-old Montana Lee Payton feels like a stranger in his own life. After the tragic death of his mother, he is forced to leave California and return to the suffocatingly small town of Laurel, Montana, to live with his estranged, rigid father. Trapped in a frozen landscape that demands a version of masculinity he cannot provide, Montana struggles with a profound sense of wrongness in his own body and the crushing weight of his father’s expectations. ​His only escape is the high school color guard, where he can briefly lose himself in the music and movement alongside his supportive captain, Jess. But as he reconnects with his childhood best friend, Ashton, and faces the hostility of a town that punishes difference, Montana fights to hold onto the flickering memory of the freedom he'd once felt in California with his mother. In a world determined to force him into a mold he doesn't fit, Montana must find the courage to survive the cold and discover the person he is truly meant to be. — Description from novelcodex.orgFull novel: LAUREL — read the rest free on N​o⁠v​e⁠l​C⁠o​d⁠e​x⁠.​o⁠r​g⁠