For Brad Edwards, adolescence is not about proms and Homecomings and sweet, clumsy first romances. It’s about coming of age on a Southern military base in the turbulent 1960s, as the country plunges into the Vietnam War and endures the agonizing birth of the Civil Rights movement. It is a time of fear, confusion and self-doubt, at once absurd, darkly funny and desperately real, as Brad learns that youth is anything but innocent, and that sometimes you make choices, but sometimes they make you. A Place You Can’t Escape follows him as he learns how to be popular, but not popular enough; resilient, but not resilient enough; brave, but not brave enough. He turns away from a faith that both comforts and tortures him, yielding to a hopeless crush on Mimi Petrycha – beautiful, manipulative and cruel. He is alternately befriended, snubbed and bullied by others, while he discovers that the adults in his life can offer no help. When Denise Hawthorne, with a wisdom born of insight and kindness, shows more faith in him than he has in himself, he embraces her love but then abruptly turns her away, lured to a forbidden place by a promise from Mimi. In a single night he sees his life and the life of another spin out of control. Five decades later, he still can’t escape the consequences of the choice he made.