This is how Lyle has spent the last ten years of his life: disassociating from his peers and living in fantasy, so long as he doesn’t have to cope with the death of his father.

Lyle Farker spends his days traveling down the rivers of Harper K-12 in Wyoming with bionic trees, watching fighter jets assault each other out the windows, or seeing his peers as prehistoric dinosaurs attacking each other over the last good slice of lunch meat. To Lyle, his imagination is just as real as anything he learns in school. In history class, he pairs up with Allen and other “friends” to work on a project. Here, he stumbles across his late father’s old treasure map and clues documenting the historical and archeological possibility that a full T-Rex skeleton exists within Wyoming. Lyle and his group go looking for the T-Rex, but the clues mean much more than digging up skeletons.

Kayleigh Marinelli’s The Fantastic Fabricated Life of Lyle Farker is equal-parts humorous and heart-warming. In this debut novel, we are taken on a journey where you can finally ask yourself, do I ever really need to say goodbye?