Teen secretly publishes mom's book for her

Before Stryker Thompson, 18, left for college, he gave his mother a thank-you gift.

"I wanted to thank my parents for all they had done for me. I was feeling a little sentimental," said Stryker, a science and engineering student at the University of Minnesota.

For the last two months of high school, the Minnesota teen secretly worked on his thank-you gift: He was self-publishing the novel his mother wrote years before.

"I felt that it was an injustice to not have a tangible object," he told the Star Tribune. “I wanted her to have something she could hold onto, to say, ‘Look, this is mine.’”

He formatted the book, edited typos, and recruited his girlfriend to design the cover just as his mother once described to him.

"I got into a groove," he said, “but it was very meticulous work.”

On June 20, he wrapped up the book, finally printed and bound, and gave it to his unsuspecting mother.

"My mom was upstairs in the kitchen eating a salad," Stryker told TODAY. “I just walked up to her and casually said, ‘Hey, Mom, I got you a little thank-you present.’ She sees the cover the way she had described it to me a couple of years ago, and without reading the title, she burst into tears and was crying and crying.”

Stryker’s mother, Mary Petrie, 51, wrote the book titled “At the End of Magic" in 2002 when she was pregnant with her third child. After receiving 27 rejection letters from publishers, she put the book aside.

When the recession hit in 2008, Petrie’s husband’s real estate business suffered. So the stay-at-home writer and mother of three felt obligated to return to work, teaching college English.

While she often spoke of self-publishing, she never found the time to do so.

Her writing career appeared to be permanently on hold — until Stryker did something about it.

"I always saw myself as a writer first and everything else second," said Petrie. “Now I get to live it out and I can’t thank my son enough. I have an enormous smile on my face and a sense of wonder at the person he is.”

Since the Star-Tribune shared the story of Petrie’s self-published novel and the son who made it happen, a publisher has shown interest in both that novel and another unpublished book of Petrie’s, “Prairie Rat.”

"On so many levels, my 18-year-old son handed me back my writing career and made it all possible," Petrie told TODAY. “I had put it on the shelf for years. But even more than that, he saw me as a full, complete person with my disappointment and my dreams.”

"I feel fueled with desire to work, and the self-direction that was missing during all the years I was focused on my students and my family and worried about money,” she added. “That happiness and sense of purpose is what Stryker gave me.”

Petrie, who is currently on sabbatical to write a nonfiction book about the professor-student relationship, has already done book readings of her novel. Her first public reading was a standing-room-only event.

Read the first chapter of “At the End of Magic” here.