The Charlatan's Boy by Jonathan Rogers

The Charlatan’s boy is a sometimes funny, sometimes heart breaking look at an orphan named Grady. Raised by Floyd, the talented con artist of Corenwald, the only life Grady knows is one of traveling from town to town trying to swindle out a living by tricking gullible towns people. As the “wild man of the Feechiefen Swamp”, Grady pretended to be a savage hostile captured and confined by Floyd, who would offer a glimpse of this rare sight for some coin. But as people from these small towns begin to disbelieve in the tales of Feechie folks, Grady and Floyd’s living starts to dwindle. As they scheme to come up with new ways to scam their way through life, one thing keeps nagging at Grady. It is the thing that has troubled him his whole life: where does he come from and what happened to his parents. These legitimate questions, however, are next to impossible to find answers to. His only link to the past is the con man Floyd and as Grady says, “I only know one man who might be able to tell me where I come from, and that man is a liar and a fraud.” And so Grady continues his life on the road, hoping one day to find a place in the world where he fits in.