Breaking into Sunlight

Praise for Breaking into Sunlight:
Winner of the 2025 Whippoorwill Book Award
An Indiana Young Hoosier Book Award middle grade winner
Nominated for the South Carolina Book Award
A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection
An Indie Next pick
A Bank Street College Best Children’s Book of the Year
A Child Mind Institute best kids’ book for mental health
A New York Public Library best book of the year for kids
An American Booksellers Association best book by a debut author
An Imagination Soup best middle grade book
* “Cochran’s debut delivers a poignant, relatable read … an important novel for every library to have.”–School Library Journal, starred review
“BREAKING INTO SUNLIGHT is a beautifully written, powerful and sensitive portrayal of addiction’s impact on a family and especially a child. Cochran has written an important book, one that captures the heartache and struggles of kids like Reese during the opioid crisis that decimated America, especially the rural communities Cochran knows so well.”–Katherine Marsh, author of The Night Tourist and The Lost Year
“BREAKING INTO SUNLIGHT is a clear-eyed story of addiction and its terrible aftermath, but one full of sympathy, generosity, and hope. This is a book defiant in its honesty and bursting with heart, wrapped around one of the most authentic thirteen year olds I’ve read in years.”–Laurel Snyder, author of Orphan Island and The Witch of Woodland
“This is not a cautionary tale or a sob story, but a shimmering journey, reminding us that life, in all its complexity, can be both enchanting and devastating all at once.”–Jake Halpern, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and New York Times bestselling author of Nightfall
“Debut author Cochran delivers a sensitive narrative that captures the complex guilt of self-care among those with addicted loved ones. … A simple and powerful tale about the impact of parental addiction.”–Kirkus Reviews

John Cochran grew up in Kansas City and studied journalism at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He worked as a reporter and editor at daily newspapers in Missouri, Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina before moving to Washington, D.C., to cover Congress for Congressional Quarterly. The National Press Foundation recognized his work with its Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for Distinguished Reporting of Congress. He now lives on Capitol Hill with his wife and children. Breaking into Sunlight is his first novel.

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