Ethan’s
Edge
A novel
Gary Stream
- YA
- Contemporary
- LGBTQ+
Ethan's Edge
A road trip. A best friend. One summer to say the true thing out loud.
- Publisher
- FILL_IN: publisher
- Release date
- FILL_IN: release date
- ISBN
- FILL_IN: ISBN
- Page count
- FILL_IN: page count
The story
The summer after junior year was supposed to be simple: Ethan, his best friend Jacob, a borrowed station wagon, and a route highlighted in orange marker from one coast to the other. Simple, except for the thing Ethan has been carrying since ninth grade — the thing that gets heavier every time Jacob laughs at one of his jokes or falls asleep against the passenger window.
Mile by mile, the country unspools past them: roadside diners, wrong turns that turn out right, a night sky in the middle of nowhere so big it makes honesty feel possible. And somewhere between the last state line and the ocean, Ethan runs out of road to hide on.
Ethan's Edge is a story about the moment before the leap — about how telling the truth doesn't shrink your world, it opens it. FILL_IN: replace this placeholder synopsis with the real one.
Get the book
- Amazon — soon
- Barnes & Noble — soon
- Bookshop.org — soon
Prefer to read free? Request Ethan’s Edge at your local library — it genuinely helps authors, and librarians love the ask.
Try the first miles
A sample from chapter one — the map, the station wagon, and the rules of the road.
This is placeholder text standing in for the real sample chapter — FILL_IN: replace with the actual excerpt from Ethan's Edge.
Jacob taped the map to the dashboard on the first morning, even though his phone could have done the job better. “Paper doesn't lose signal,” he said, like it was a law of physics, and Ethan didn't argue, because arguing with Jacob before ten a.m. was a losing sport and because the map had a crease running right through Kansas that looked like a heartbeat.
They were forty miles out of town before Ethan let himself exhale. Home shrank in the mirror the way he'd always hoped it would — not disappearing, exactly. Just getting small enough to carry.
“Okay,” Jacob said, bare feet on the dash, sunburn already starting. “Rules of the road. One: driver picks the music. Two: no lying about being hungry. Three—” he paused, and the pause had a shape to it, a held-breath shape Ethan would spend the next two thousand miles trying not to name. “Three, we don't go home the same people who left.”
Ethan kept his eyes on the road. The white lines came at them slow and steady, like a countdown to something neither of them had said out loud yet.
“Deal,” he said, and it came out steadier than it had any right to.
Content notes
So every reader can decide what they’re ready for — here’s what the story carries:
- FILL_IN: content note (e.g., homophobia, challenged on the page)
- FILL_IN: content note (e.g., brief underage drinking)
- FILL_IN: content note (e.g., a car accident, off-page)
After the book
Not ready to leave the road?
From the world of the book
Step into the world of Ethan’s Edge
Follow Ethan and Jacob’s cross-country road trip on Jathan Forever — the companion site with mile markers, postcards, and stops the book only hints at.
Coming soon — the postcard’s in the mail