Books/ Drawdown
A Standalone Young Adult Novel
Drawdown
Ten friends. Four families. One last August on Lake Martin, and a lake about to be lowered to show what it has been holding all summer.
Four families have spent eighteen summers on Lake Martin, Alabama, and their ten children grew up as one tangled thing. This is their last August together. Told in the warm voice of the lake itself, Drawdown is a novel about friendship, first love, and the quiet courage of becoming who you are before the water goes down.
A young adult coming-of-age novel of Lake Martin, Alabama, by Cade Morrow.
Available on Amazon in paperback and ebook.
About the book
For eighteen summers, four families have come to Lake Martin and gone home a little more tangled in one another’s lives. The Pattersons arrive from Montgomery with a name that opens doors. The St. Clairs come up from Birmingham with newer money and faster boats. The Caldwells have kept the marina longer than anyone can remember. The Gallaghers, artists from somewhere else, found the quiet end of the lake and stayed.
Their ten children grew up as one thing, from dock to pontoon to bonfire. This is the last August they will be that thing. By fall, college and family expectation will pull them in ten directions, and nobody on the water is quite ready to say so.
Drawdown is told by a narrator who sounds like the lake itself: ancient, observant, forgiving, and deeply fond of every one of them. It moves between this final week and the summers behind it, and it knows what they do not yet know. Every winter the lake is lowered, and the shoreline gives up what summer hides. Over one last week, ten young people are lowered too, down to what is true.
It is a book about friendship, first love, and the families that make us and the ones we choose, as soft as worn velvet and as honest as red clay.
Read the opening
Chapter 1
If you stood on the sun-baked bluffs of Chimney Rock in the late August heat of 2026 and looked down at the water, you wouldn’t see the heavy, invisible legacy of Montgomery politics. You wouldn’t see the restless, flashy wealth of Birmingham, the calloused hands of the marina workers, or the quiet bohemian escapes of out-of-state artists.
From the outside looking in, you would only see them.
Ten golden kids sprawled across a drifting pontoon boat, tangled together like a complicated knot, their uninhibited laughter echoing off the pines. They were a chosen family, bound by the comforting glow of shared history and secrets kept in the dark. To look at them in the late summer sun, passing a joint back and forth in the velvet-soft stillness of the cove, you would think they were invincible. You would never know that the water beneath them was about to be drawn down, that paths were about to diverge, or that the aching, beautiful transition into adulthood had already begun.
What the book is about
But the lake knew. The lake remembered it all, starting from the very beginning.
Drawdown is a coming-of-age novel for readers who want the warmth and the ache of one last summer without cruelty. Its ten friends are gay, lesbian, and straight, rich and not, rooted and restless, and none of them is punished for who they are or whom they love. The book argues, through its story rather than through any speech, that chosen family is real family, that the choices we regret can be survived, and that growing up is less a loss than a lowering of the water until you can see the bottom. It is rooted in the real geography and the real history of Lake Martin, including the valley that lies beneath it, and it treats that history with care.
Book details
- Author Cade Morrow
- Format Standalone novel, paperback and ebook
- Genre Young adult literary fiction, LGBTQ+ coming of age
- Setting Lake Martin, Alabama, one last August
- Length About 55,000 words, 10 chapters, 187 pages
- Audience Young adult and new adult crossover, ages 18 to 20. Includes drinking and cannabis use among 18 to 20 year olds in group scenes. Romance fades at the threshold.
If you like
Readers of Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe and André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name , who want the Deep South underneath it: a lake, a long August, and a friend group so tightly braided that no one can come out, or fall in love, without the whole circle feeling it. A queer coming-of-age ensemble in the warm, forgiving spirit of Jubilee, where the stakes are tenderness and timing, and nobody is punished for who they love.
More from Cade Morrow
Drawdown stands on its own. Cade's first young adult novel is Jubilee, set across one graduation day on the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay. For adult literary fiction of the South, try Common Ground, a love story set in rural Alabama, Brackish, a novel of three families and one fish camp in the Alabama delta, or Sourwood, a novel of inheritance on the Georgia coast, or start the Ebb Tide series on the Gulf Coast with Still Waters. Browse all of Cade's novels.
About the author
Cade Morrow writes quiet, deeply felt literary fiction set in the small towns and back roads of the American South, in a plainspoken voice concerned with memory, place, and the private weather of ordinary lives. A son of the Deep South, he writes from the heart, telling stories of life in the LGBTQ+ community, some drawn from his own experience, others from the compassionate observation of the people around him. Read more about Cade.
One last August on Lake Martin.
Find it on Amazon