When ten-year-old Ezekiel “Bonkie” Harrison wakes up alone in a hotel with no sign of his father except a pocket watch and a few dollars, he must set out to track down the man who left him behind.
But mid-nineteenth-century Missouri is a lawless frontier. Bonkie is immediately robbed and staggers into the next town broke, weary, and hungry. After he’s caught stealing carrots from a garden, its owner, Mathilda, treats him with a gentle kindness that renews Bonkie’s hope, and when he meets Rufus, a freeman who lives off the land, Bonkie slowly learns how to be the kind of man Mathilda deserves. But as the years pass, rumors of his father’s whereabouts won’t leave him alone.
Don’t Never Give Up is a stirring, coming-of-age glimpse into the trials of westward expansion and Manifest Destiny.