Kid America by C.M. Worthman

A Novel of Inheritance and Survival

Author’s Debut YA Novel Addresses Urban Adolescence, Rural Living, and Breaking the Cycle of Dysfunction

TRAVERSE CITY, MICHIGAN—Sometimes, survival comes in the form of escaping the family you’ve been born into.

Sixteen-year-old Lenny, raised by a single mom in Chicago and growing up through the COVID-19 pandemic isolation, finds himself caught in dysfunction after his mother is jailed for a drug conviction. Suddenly, he’s dealing with a grandfather who can’t stand the government, a grandmother who teaches him about farm life in rural Illinois, and being the primary caretaker for both as they fall ill with COVID-19. 

His only source of comfort? Misty, a neighbor his age, who understands what it’s like to wish there was a way out, despite loving the very individuals keeping you suffocated.

“The book is about growing up poor and not being able to count on others,” describes the author, C.M. Worthman. “It’s not that people don’t love you—they do. It’s that they don’t know how to care for or nurture you, in part, because of their own struggles.”

Worthman, who wrote the first draft of Lenny’s story in late 2021, revisited the manuscript in 2023 and finally had a sharable draft two years later. 

“Lenny’s life reflects the struggle many adolescents face today, especially those with limited choices and little possibility of change. The fact that Lenny is a white male raised in a diverse urban environment who finds himself in an unfamiliar rural setting is distinctive in today’s young adult literature world,” Worthman says. “Distinct, too, is that Kid America is one of the first novels, if not the first, to take on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on families already struggling and often left behind by modern society.”

At its early stages, Kid America didn’t have a destination yet. Worthman knew his character Lenny: a late teenager whose life was turned upside down by the pandemic. He knew the struggle Lenny would go through, defining it as the “ultimate denial of personhood,” being at the whim of family, strangers, and state. 

“Although not autobiographical, Kid America reflects my experiences growing up amidst family dysfunction and generational trauma,” Worthman says. “Additionally, it captures the cultural chasms I have always felt, and I saw most acutely during the COVID-19 epidemic: the differences of experience and perspective between urban and rural, working class and affluent, and college-educated and not. With Kid America, I wanted to capture as free of my own biases as possible one adolescent’s experience transcending some of these chasms and coming to terms with what lies ahead of him.”

Worthman’s history of literacy-focused works, including a 2002 ethnography about adolescents’ out-of-school literacy development, provides a unique insight into how urban youth behave and grow, which lends well to Lenny’s journey as he’s dropped into a world so opposite from what he has known. 

Early praise notes Worthman’s debut novel as a must-read, especially as society has only recently recovered from the pandemic this story is centered around. 

Advance Praise for Kid America

“Kid America is a raw, clear‑eyed portrait of a boy trying to stay whole while the adults around him fracture. Worthman writes with an honesty that never turns cruel, capturing the loneliness, loyalty, and stubborn hope of a kid who’s been asked to carry far too much. It’s a story about inheritance—the kind we never asked for—and the small, human moments that keep us going anyway.” — Douglas Rappaport, screenwriter, storyteller, and author of Reckoner

“C.M. Worthman writes with unflinching precision and a poet’s eye, rendering rural isolation with such clarity that the landscape itself becomes a force—pressing in, obscuring, and ultimately reshaping the lives within it. This is a story that lingers long after the final page, insisting that we bear witness to the ‘nobodies’ who endure when every system meant to protect them falls away.” — Sarah Donovan, associate professor of secondary English education at Oklahoma State University, and author of Writer to Writer

The Author

C.M. Worthman is a teacher, father, writer, and champion of youthful brilliance. He has taught for thirty-five plus years at the middle grades, high school, and university levels. After getting his doctorate from the University of Illinois at Chicago, he landed at DePaul University in Chicago, where he is a professor of Middle Grades and Secondary English Education. 

Over the years, he has developed and led community-based literacy programs, as well as taught an Inside-Out course, "Deconstructing the School to Prison Pipeline," inside Cook County Jail. He has researched and written extensively about adolescents’ in and out of school literacy experiences and has published numerous scholarly articles and one ethnography, “Just Playing the Part”: Engaging Adolescents in Drama & Literacy (Teachers College Press, 2002). He now focuses on writing middle grade and young adult novels. 

C.M. is committed to writing narratives with strong, memorable characters and smart plot lines that speak to the complexity of adolescent existence, the power of the imaginative will, and the interdependency of all life. Kid America (Mission Point Press) is only the first of more to come. You can find C.M. in Chicago in classrooms, coffee shops, bookstores, and on the lakefront, running or biking.

The Book

Kid America: A Novel of Inheritance and Survival

C.M. Worthman

172 pages, 5.5” x 8.5”, B/W

Young Adult Fiction / Coming of Age / Family / General / Lifestyles / Country Life

ISBN: 978-1-968761-85-1, $24.95 (Hardcover)

ISBN: 978-1-968761-86-8, $17.95 (Softcover)

Publication Date: 11/3/2026

Mission Point Press

Copies are available for preorder at Bookshop.org, Amazon, and other online retailers. On its November 3 publication date, it will be available for purchase wherever books are sold. For information or to arrange for signings and events, contact the author at cworthma@icloud.com.