Little Texas College: My Search for Ancestry and Identity, A Novel

Carl Wallace is a student at Little Texas College, and he is extremely confused about his ancestry and identity. His parents also teach at LTC, his mother as a botanist, his father as an astronomer. They tell him he is an in vitro fertilization baby, but he suspects that's not the whole truth. His persistent search for the meaning of life, especially his own, leads him away from an expected science major to studies in literature, art, music, and religion. His guilt and anguish over a freak accident involving Ken, his roommate from Taiwan, bring him to the counselor Marv Cohen, an Iraq War veteran confined to a wheelchair. Marv helps Carl cope with his sense of nothingness and estrangement and learn how to live an authentic life in what Carl believes is an absurd world. In his third year at LTC, Carl spends a term in Mexico and encounters a completely different way of life in a Zapotec weaving community. Is he falling in love with Juana, the daughter from the host family? Eventually, Carl and Juana sell the annual village output of rugs and blankets to wealthy tourists in a ghost town valley near Aspen, Colorado. But while he is there, a quick trip home to Texas at his mother's urgent request brings him face to face with the truth about his fathers. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Carl writes this serious but amusing story of his search for ancestry and identity at Little Texas College. Includes Readers Guide.