Winner of the 2026 BCALA Self-Publishing eBook Award for Fiction.
Destiny Monroe came into Detroit Receiving Hospital the same way she came into the world. Alone, broke, and fighting for her life. Sixteen years old. She died on the table at 12:23 AM, leaving behind a son she held for forty-three seconds.
His name is Silas Page. And this is the story of what the system did with him next.
A group home that warehoused thirty-one children in a house licensed for eighteen, run by a woman who collected the state checks and skimmed the difference. A caseworker who tried to hand Silas to a predator because the predator paid better than the paperwork. A funeral-home family who tried to adopt him, and the same caseworker who tore that adoption apart out of spite.
Then Solomon Banks, the man they called Priest. A warehouse full of foster-system castoffs who Priest called family while he trained them to steal and to kill. Silas became a killer at twelve. He robbed an old man of his grandchildren's college fund. The book does not redeem him for it.
This is Black literary fiction that treats the foster pipeline and the carceral system as architecture, not backdrop. It does not moralize. It does not give its protagonist a redemption arc that does the reader's work for them. It asks what becomes of children the state has already decided are disposable, and it answers in a voice that does not flinch.
Silas Page is the story of a boy who was meant for more than what the world had planned for him, and the long, costly work of finding out what that means when every choice has already been taken from you.
