Farewell Bend weaves fact and fiction into a story that takes readers back to the 1950s in a small Western town where the narrator's father runs the local paper as his own benevolent fiefdom. On one level, the novel is a coming of age story - a reminiscence by sixty-five year old Jack Kavanagh. On another level, it is a song of tribute to Jack's risk-taking friend Pete Sanger, and to his Japanese American classmates, as well as the family and the weekly newspaper that he longed to flee so that he could enter the adult world. But the town turns out to be the home Jack can never return to and can't leave behind.