Books/ Jubilee
The Eastern Shore Triptych, Book One
Jubilee
Three boys raised to carry a name. One graduation day. The night the water gives up what it has been holding.
On Alabama's Eastern Shore, where old families keep their seats and their silences, three inseparable friends, Theo, Win, and Gray, have spent their whole lives being groomed to carry a name forward. Told across the single day of Theo's high-school graduation, Jubilee is a warm, luminous coming-of-age about first love, the weight of legacy, and the night the water gives up what it has been holding.
A young adult coming-of-age novel of Alabama's Mobile Bay, by Cade Morrow.
Available on Amazon.
About the book
They called them the Triple Threat, three boys who owned every field on the Eastern Shore between them, sons of families whose names are on the banks and the buildings and the boards. Theo Beaumont has spent eighteen years learning to read a room for what it expects of him: the presentable heir, slotted for the family bank, meant to marry well and keep the line quiet and continuous. Win and Gray carry the same weight. None of them was ever asked who he actually is.
On Mobile Bay, a jubilee is a real thing: the rare, beloved night the deep water gives up what it has been holding, and the whole shore wakes and runs down to the shallows. Across the single day of his graduation, Theo tells the story of the three of them: the friendship that raised him, the truth he has kept in the dark, and the summer everything came up into the light where it could be seen.
Warm, lyrical, and unafraid, Jubilee reframes a coming-out as exactly what it is: not a crisis, but a jubilee.
Read the opening
Chapter 1
The tie was my father’s, and it did not want to be tied.
I stood at the mirror in the front hall with my collar up and the silk hanging two uneven lengths past my hands, working the same knot for the third time, because some knots you have to get wrong twice before your fingers remember.
There is a portrait of my grandfather at twenty on the stair landing, and I had spent eighteen years not looking at it, and that morning I looked at it. Same sandy hair that will not lie flat no matter what you put on it. Same straight nose. Same jaw, which the family calls the Beaumont jaw as though they had it commissioned. The only thing in my face that did not come out of that frame is my eyes, which are my mother’s and are green, and which she likes to say are the one part of me they never got to put a name on.
What the book is about
I have always been happy to be the one who holds the light.
Set on the Eastern Shore of Alabama's Mobile Bay, Jubilee unfolds across a single day, Theo Beaumont's high-school graduation, narrated in first person and in direct address, hour by hour, with memory running back to grade school. Its core is the collision between who you were raised to become and who you actually are. On the Eastern Shore, old money is not loud. It is expectation, inherited and total: a seat held at a firm, a name on a building, a line you are meant to extend. Against that pressure the book makes its quiet argument, that love which is true rather than converted, and a legacy worth keeping, are the ones you can carry as yourself.
Book details
- Author Cade Morrow
- Series The Eastern Shore Triptych, Book One (each book stands alone)
- Genre Young adult literary fiction, LGBTQ+ coming-of-age
- Setting Mobile Bay, Eastern Shore of Alabama
- Length About 50,700 words, 12 chapters
- Content Non-explicit, fade-to-black
If you like
Readers of Benjamin Alire Sáenz's Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe and Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower , with the warmth and reach of Becky Albertalli's Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda and the quiet interiority of Nina LaCour's We Are Okay , set in the old-money Gulf Coast atmosphere of Delia Owens's Where the Crawdads Sing.
More from Cade Morrow
Jubilee is Cade's first novel for younger readers, and it stands on its own. For adult literary fiction on the same coast, read Brackish, a novel of three families and one fish camp in the Alabama delta, Common Ground, a love story set in rural Alabama, or start the Ebb Tide series with Still Waters. Browse all of Cade's novels.
About the author
Cade Morrow writes literary fiction rooted in the Gulf Coast South: the water, the old families, and the long shadow a name can throw. Jubilee is the first book of the Eastern Shore Triptych and Cade's first novel for younger readers, with the same landscape and the same close attention to family, belonging, and the cost of being known, carried in a warmer, nearer voice than the adult Cade Morrow titles. Read more about Cade.
Stand in the water at four in the morning.
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