The Book of Should: What Was Expected and What Survived

By Lester Leavitt

Flynn Thorne is sixteen years old, homeschooled in a Christian nationalist household in eastern Iowa, and monitored by software that tracks every keystroke, every search, every deviation from the curriculum that has defined the boundaries of Flynn's existence since birth. The name that comes up on their phone says JORDAN. The school records say JORDAN. The legal system, the medical system, the theology, the alarm on the bedroom door - every institution in Flynn's life enforces the same binary. Flynn is none of the things the institutions say Flynn should be. When a jailbroken phone opens a seven-minute window onto a world where people exist outside the binary, Flynn's carefully managed containment begins to fracture. A grandmother named Kate breaks nine years of silence to tell the story of Glenn Peterson - Flynn's great-grandfather, a gay Mormon man who survived electroshock therapy and spent sixty years encoding his forbidden love into the voicing of a pipe organ in a Methodist church across the Mississippi River. The tools Glenn used are in a leather case. The note inside says: "For the one who hears what the pipes are saying."

The Book of Should is the human-scale companion to another Driftless Rivers Franchise novel, The Reciprocity Clause. While the constitutional conference debates who defines consciousness, this novel tells the story of one consciousness that refused to be defined - and the community of ordinary people who opened the cage, not with ideology, but with car keys and spare bedrooms and the stubborn conviction that the 'volunteers' don't get pulled up with the weeds. Set in the Driftless Area river towns of Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin, the novel follows Flynn's extraction, recovery, and arrival at the organ bench where Glenn's sixty-year love letter has been waiting for the hands that would hear it.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GR5VWCRG
• ISBN13: 9798250151900
• Release Date: March 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 314 Pages
• Weight: 0.93 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"