Embracing Zak: Community Compassion is a Powerful Force

2026 International Impact Book Award, Young Adult Fiction; 2025 Moonbeam Children’s Book Award, Mystery and Horror; 2025 Book Excellence Award, Diversity and Inclusion; Mom’s Choice Award Gold, Adult and Young Adult Fiction; 2025 Positive Impact Book Awards, winner in three categories, Voices of Strength Award, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Positive Impact Fiction

He wears red shoes. In Riverdale, Minnesota, that is the least interesting thing about him.

Zak Jordan arrives in a small Midwestern town with a reputation that got there first and one last chance to waste. His uncle is the sheriff. His aunt teaches at the school that has already decided who he is. Everyone in Riverdale agrees on the diagnosis before anybody asks the question.

A possible wrongful conviction haunts the community. Nearly 20 years before Zak’s story, someone whose behavior and social differences reminded people of Zak was blamed for a murder that many townspeople believed he did not commit.

When troubling, similar circumstances begin emerging in the present, the old case becomes impossible to ignore. The central question is whether the community is repeating its past pattern—misreading a vulnerable, neurodivergent person, rushing to blame, and allowing fear or prejudice to substitute for evidence. As Zak unravels hidden truths, the town’s certainties begin to come apart.

What Zak cannot explain, because nobody has ever explained it to him, is why a classroom sounds like a riot, why his body moves before he decides to, and why the world seems to run at a speed everyone else can manage. He is living with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder. Nobody has told him.

Embracing Zak is a mystery about coming of age all the while being thoroughly misunderstood, as the community’s frozen truth thaws because Zak bothered to find out. Zak’s character development draws on more than one hundred interviews with people living with FASD, and it renders from the inside what most writing about neurodiversity describes only from a distance.

For readers of contemporary young adult fiction, small-town mystery, and anyone who has ever been the person a room made up its mind about.

Riverdale first appeared in The Whitest Wall, twenty years before the events of this book. Embracing Hope, by Carl Young and Joel Sheagren, walks alongside this story as a guide for readers and families who want to go further in understanding and making a difference.

Jodee Kulp has written more books about Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders than any other parent advocate working today. Her daughter, Liz Kulp (1986 to 2024), was an award-winning author who lived with FASD.