A Time for Mill Boys
In 1895 New England, fifteen-year-old Henry Malone vanishes from his family home, exposing a clandestine industrial pipeline operating beneath the textile mills of Lowell and Andover. At its center is Tom Wilson, an ideological predator who operates an illicit child labor network to satisfy a messianic need for total psychological control over the vulnerable. Driven by a dark current of manipulation masquerading as care, the search for Henry forces his fractured family to navigate their own deep internal rifts. While his sisters Anna and Hannah wrestle with the tightening constraints of rural life and their family’s grief, their elder brother Algernon faces a moral crossroads as he attempts to separate himself from the farm by reinventing himself within a powerful merchant empire. A Time for Mill Boys captures the tense collision between calculated systemic exploitation and quiet human survival.
Available November 9, 2026 on Amazon and at select North Shore independent book sellers.
Rooted Here
- Set in the Lowell and Andover mills, 1895, and written by a North Andover author.
- A second strand runs to the Pillsbury mine in Chisholm, Minnesota, on the Mesabi Iron Range.
- The author is available for readings, signings, and book club visits.
About the Author
Donald Edward Felch is a human being shaped by fracture, forged in fire, and still standing. A thirty-year veteran of the United States Air Force, he spent decades teaching, training, and leading, on flightlines, in classrooms, and in crisis. He has lived in forty-five homes across America, traveled through Europe, the Middle East, and the South Pacific, and raised a family in the storm. Don now teaches leadership, management, and citizenship to high school students near Boston, Massachusetts. A Time for Mill Boys is his first novel.
Booksellers
Orders, consignment, and trade inquiries: orders@jezznik.com · (978) 226-8516. Correspondence with the author through the publisher: donald.felch@jezznik.com.