Brief Summary of School Reading List Books - Ievgen Sykalo 2026

Woundabout by Lev Rosen

Woundabout — a name that sounds like something circular and hurting, doesn’t it? A twist in the road, a loop of grief, a town that turns in on itself and doesn’t quite know how to move forward. That’s where this story takes us, and it begins, as many great stories do, with a pair of orphans and a funeral.

Let me tell it to you properly.

PART ONE: THE CIRCULAR CITY OF SORROW

Luna and Theo. Two kids holding hands at the edge of the world, or at least, that’s how it felt. Their fathers had just died in an explosion — a senseless, news-swallowed tragedy in some distant war zone. One moment, two bright, compassionate men working to make the world better; the next, ashes and headlines. No body. Just silence.

That was the first wound.

Now Luna, the girl with braids tighter than most people’s schedules, and Theo, quieter than a page left blank, were being shipped to their new home. Not a relative’s house — no, there were no relatives left — but to a strange little town called Woundabout. A place neither had heard of, chosen for them by bureaucracy and sealed envelopes.

The town was peculiar from the start. You could see it in the way the river didn’t flow. It just… spiraled. Round and round like someone had stirred it with a giant spoon and left it that way forever. Woundabout didn’t move forward. It circled. Always.

The kids arrived on the Woundabout train with their terrier, Gary, who had the look of a dog that had seen too much and barked too little. They were met by their new guardian, a sharp-edged woman named Aunt Bridget — although she insisted on just “Bridget” and didn’t smile much, or at all.

Bridget was the town’s mayor, which might have meant something in a livelier place. But in Woundabout, mayorship seemed more about keeping things exactly the same than changing anything. Her favorite word was “No.” No questions. No wandering. No change. No talking about the past. And definitely — most definitely — no feeling.

The children moved into her tidy, clinical house that smelled like disinfectant and secrets. There were no photos. No warmth. No welcome. Bridget gave them their schedule, their room, and nothing else.

But grief does not follow schedules, and orphans do not stop asking questions.

“Why doesn’t the river flow?” asked Luna.

“What happened to the rest of the town?” wondered Theo, who noticed the empty houses, the quiet streets, the strange silences like something had been peeled away from Woundabout.

Their questions were met with walls.

Still, something about the town itched at them — something unfinished, something broken. And they weren’t the only ones who noticed. Gary, their loyal, scruffy companion, began to bark at odd places, sniff at hidden corners, dig at secrets buried deep. There was more to Woundabout than its strange name. Beneath its polite monotony, the town pulsed with something stifled.

And then, the children found the garden.

A wild, overgrown patch in the heart of Woundabout, closed off by a gate with ivy growing like nervous fingers. It was different from the rest of the town. Untamed. Real. And in the center of the garden stood something that didn’t belong anywhere in their rational world — a mechanical contraption with copper vines, gears, and levers, almost like a fountain, but not quite.

The children weren’t sure what it was. But it looked like it used to do something.

Something important.

“Maybe it moved the river,” Theo said, voice hushed.

“Or the town,” Luna added.

And in that moment, the heart of Woundabout seemed to beat just a little faster.

PART TWO: THE MACHINE THAT REMEMBERS

Luna reached out and touched the strange copper petals of the machine. It was cold, dormant — like a wound that had scabbed over but never healed. Theo crouched beside it, brushing away the moss and debris that had collected over what must’ve been years of disuse. The gears were stuck. The joints creaked. But there was a shape beneath the rust, a design too precise to be random.

“It’s like it’s waiting,” Luna whispered. “Like it wants to work.”

“Maybe it can’t,” Theo said, still kneeling, his fingers tracing symbols etched into the base. Not letters. Not numbers. Curves and lines, almost like musical notes or instructions for something very old and very complicated.

Gary barked suddenly, loud and urgent.

They turned. Behind them, Bridget stood at the garden gate, her mouth pressed into a thin, bitter line.

“You are not to be in here,” she said, voice sharp as scissors. “This place is off-limits.”

“But what is it?” Luna asked. “Why is it hidden?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Bridget snapped. “It doesn’t work. And the town is fine without it.”

“But the river—” Theo started.

“The river is not your concern,” Bridget interrupted. “You will forget about this place, and you will not come back. Do you understand?”

They nodded, because they had to. But inside, they were already planning their return.

That was the second wound: being told not to question what your heart knew mattered.

The days that followed were filled with the quiet rebellion of children who grieve by searching for answers. They wandered the town under the pretense of errands, watching, listening. They spoke to people — what few remained — and learned something startling: nobody in Woundabout wanted change.

A boy their age, Marlon, rolled past them in a wheelchair with a cheerful nod, but when Luna asked what had happened to his legs, he shrugged. “It’s not important,” he said. “Things are fine.”

An old baker, Mrs. Bellamy, smiled stiffly from behind a counter of hard bread. When asked about the empty houses on her street, she replied, “People left. Best not to talk about it.”

And the librarian — a gaunt man with glasses so thick they looked like magnifying lenses — handed them dusty books, all written before a certain year. Anything newer? “Not stocked,” he said. “We don’t need anything new.”

Woundabout, it seemed, was stuck. Not just the river. Not just the machine. But the people. And worse — they liked it that way.

Or had convinced themselves to.

At night, Luna would sit by the window, staring out at the looping river, her thoughts circling just like the water. “Don’t you feel it?” she asked Theo. “This place is scared of something. They’ve locked up change like it’s a monster.”

Theo would nod, quiet, thoughtful. “Maybe it is. Maybe something happened that made them scared.”

The third wound. The fear of pain so deep that even healing feels dangerous.

But pain has a way of finding cracks, and soon the cracks began to widen.

Theo returned alone to the garden one evening, heart pounding with the guilt of defiance. But it wasn’t defiance. It was need. He needed to understand the machine. Needed to know why his fathers had died and left him in a town that refused to feel. As he studied the gears, something unexpected happened.

The machine shifted.

Just slightly. A soft click, almost like it sighed in its sleep. He jumped back — but then leaned in again. And this time, he placed his hand where the symbols had been.

And the machine responded.

A soft hum. A flicker of light. Not enough to wake it, but enough to say: I remember.

He ran home breathless, wild-eyed, and told Luna everything.

They returned the next day with tools. Oil. Determination. Gary kept watch. And slowly, piece by piece, they began to bring the machine back to life. They didn’t know what it would do, exactly. But they knew it mattered.

That was when the dreams began.

Theo dreamed of the river flowing backward. Of a flood washing the town clean. Of a face — one of his fathers — saying, Don’t be afraid to move forward.

Luna dreamed of a garden blooming so wildly it broke the fences. Of people crying, laughing, feeling again. Of the machine turning like a great wheel of time and grief and growth.

Woundabout was trying to wake up. But someone didn’t want it to.

One morning, they found the machine smashed.

Gears ripped out. Levers bent. The garden torn apart as if in rage.

Gary whined, pawing at the wreckage. Luna stood frozen. Theo wept.

Bridget arrived a moment later, her coat flapping like a black flag in the wind. “You will stop,” she said. “This town doesn’t need fixing. It needs stillness. Order.”

“You’re wrong,” Luna said, her voice shaking with fury. “It needs grief. It needs to move.”

“Don’t you think we tried that once?” Bridget said, and for the first time, something cracked in her voice. “Don’t you think I wanted it to work?”

And then she told them.

There had been a time, years ago, when the machine was the town’s heart — a living device built by its founders to regulate not just the river but the emotional tides of the people. A balance of change and stillness. But after a great loss — the death of Bridget’s own wife — the machine faltered. People grew afraid. Afraid of feeling too much. Afraid of chaos. They shut the machine down. And when they did, the river stopped. The town stilled.

Time, in a way, stopped.

“I thought I was protecting them,” Bridget said. “But maybe I was just protecting myself.”

That was the fourth wound: the lie of control as a balm for pain.

PART THREE: WHAT FLOWS, WHAT BREAKS

Bridget’s confession hung in the air like mist—thick, clinging, impossible to ignore. Her voice, usually so crisp and clipped, had softened to something raw. The children stared at her, unsure if they were looking at the same cold woman who had once barked at them for walking too slowly. Now she looked smaller, older. Not weak, exactly. Just… human.

The silence that followed wasn’t empty. It was full. Full of the things she hadn’t said before. Of the grief she'd locked up in her chest so tightly the key had rusted in the lock.

“We loved her,” Bridget said, and for the first time, Luna saw it — not just the rigidity, but the absence that had shaped it. “She died, and I thought… if we could just keep everything still, I wouldn’t lose anything else.”

That was the root of it all, wasn’t it? Woundabout was a town built on loss that no one dared touch. A place where memory was so painful, people had chosen numbness over healing. Like putting a tourniquet on a soul and never loosening it.

But Luna and Theo weren’t from Woundabout.

They still knew how to feel.

And even though they’d lost their fathers — even though the ache gnawed at them every day — they wanted to move forward. To cry. To shout. To remember. To live. They could no longer accept a world of silence.

So Luna did what no one in Woundabout had done in years: she yelled.

“You can’t fix pain by pretending it didn’t happen! You can’t freeze it out of people!”

Bridget didn’t answer. She only turned her face away, as if the truth stung more than she'd expected.

They tried to fix the machine.

Again.

Together.

The kids, Gary, even Bridget—though she was awkward at it, clumsy with the wrench and the grief. She brought them old blueprints, maps with ink faded to gray, a notebook that had once belonged to her wife. Pages and pages about “emotional engineering,” diagrams that felt like poetry written in wire and cog. The machine, they realized, wasn’t just mechanical. It was organic in its own way — a vessel that transformed feelings into motion. Grief into flow. Change into healing.

But repairing it wasn’t easy. Some pieces were gone for good. Some had rusted into nonsense. And worse — the town had changed around it. Walls had gone up. Trees had grown into places they didn’t belong. Pipes had shifted. A decade of stillness doesn’t just wait patiently; it resists movement when it returns.

And the people… they were divided.

Some, like Mrs. Bellamy, came to the garden after hearing whispers. She stood silently at the gate, watching, something crumbling in her hard-set face. Others scoffed, walked away muttering about children and their silly projects. But a few—just a few—stepped forward.

Marlon came. He brought parts from his father’s shed, screws and tubing and old pieces of copper. “I want the river to move again,” he said simply. “I want us to move.”

The children weren’t leaders, not really. But they had become something else: catalysts. Sparks in a dry town. They didn’t give speeches or make promises. They just kept going, even when it hurt. Especially when it hurt.

Theo, who had always been the quiet one, was the first to cry openly in the garden. Not just for his fathers, but for the whole cracked world. It poured out of him like water from a blocked pipe. And Luna didn’t stop him. She cried too. Not clean tears — not the kind that fall politely — but sobs that bent her forward like wind through a tree. And Bridget? She didn’t say a word.

She only sat down beside them.

Gary rested his head on Theo’s knee and didn’t bark. He just was. In that moment, he understood more than most people ever do: sometimes, presence is enough.

The machine awoke slowly.

A gear shifted. A valve turned. A humming sound, so soft it could be mistaken for the wind, began to rise.

The garden changed.

Vines lifted their heads. Leaves shimmered. A faint mist rose from the base of the device. The river, still locked in its spiral, trembled — a single ripple escaping the loop.

And then something unexpected happened: the people began to bring their pain.

One by one, they arrived at the garden not to fix the machine, but to share their stories — long-buried griefs that had gathered dust in their hearts. An old man brought a photo of a daughter he’d lost in childhood. A teacher read aloud from a journal she’d kept when her husband left. Even Mrs. Bellamy admitted that her bakery had once made birthday cakes, not just hard bread — for children who no longer lived in town.

The machine listened.

It needed those stories, those memories. It didn’t run on electricity or steam or magic.

It ran on truth.

The wounds of the town, when opened, didn’t bleed—they bloomed.

And at last, with a creaking groan like someone stretching after a long, cold sleep, the machine turned.

The river flowed.

Not all at once. Not in a rush. But forward, finally. Outward. Toward the sea.

Woundabout changed after that.

Not perfectly. Not quickly. But honestly.

People left. People came. The town stopped fearing change as something that would destroy them. They began to see it as something necessary, like breath. Like sorrow. Like love. Bridget didn’t stop being strict — but she started smiling more, especially when she watched the children walk to school. Marlon got a new wheelchair, one he helped design. And the garden? It became a place not of avoidance, but remembrance.

A place where people went to feel.

And Luna and Theo — well, they never stopped missing their fathers. But in Woundabout, they found something they hadn’t expected to find again: hope.

Hope that grief isn’t a place to live in forever, but a river you have to learn to step into, again and again, knowing it will carry you forward, even when you feel like drowning.

Because what wounds us doesn’t have to stop us.

It can move us.

It can make us real.

It can make us whole.

THE END.