The Crowd and the Merrimack (Paperback) by Bryce Ian

Conrad O'Connor has created a careful regimen to guarantee his social status and not make any waves at his small town high school. However, when an old friend calls him out to the bridge one night, Conrad's routine is forever shaken. As his friend's decision ripples through their community, it becomes the catalyst for a deadly new trend.

"The Crowd and the Merrimack" is a humorously dark take on your typical young adult or coming of age story. It's a callback to those harsher times we experience, simply wading through the complexities of certain social spheres. For Conrad it is the formative and cruel microcosm that is high school, senior year, and what's beyond it is entirely a mystery.

Conrad is complex, obsessive (nearly compulsive) and comfortable with the status quo of his teenage high school senior life. He is the young person in us that just wants to be the cool kid, accepted by everyone, and somehow understood. Clique loyalty however is more important to Conrad than friendships from his childhood, even though his current friends might not be friends to him at all.

"The Crowd and the Merrimack" touches on many of the pervasive issues of youth. While stresses of school and family life are one thing, friendships, peers, and social dramas play the largest part in Conrad's life as he knows it. Eventually the realities of love, death, change, and mental illness inundate our protagonist's world and choices have to be made in this coming of age satire.