His parents make last-minute arrangements for him to attend a community center camp, instead, a prospect that prompts 'the familiar contracting retreat of the thing that lived deep in his chest, which must be his soul.' Impulsively, Ware escapes to the rubbled remains of a nearby church the perfect place for the Middle Ages obsessed boy to build his own medieval refuge while pretending to attend camp. When Ware's grandmother falls and breaks her hip, the idle summer that the relentlessly scheduled 11-and-a-half-year-old was looking forward to is canceled. Thou shalt be always the champion of the Right and Good-and vows to save the lot.īut what does a hero look like in real life? And what can two misfit kids do? As different as Ware and Jolene are, though, they have one thing in common: for them, the lot is a refuge.īut when their sanctuary is threatened, Ware looks to the knights’ Code of Chivalry: Thou shalt do battle against unfairness wherever faced with it. Jolene scoffs, calling him a dreamer-he doesn’t live in the “real world” like she does. Soon he starts skipping Rec, creating a castle-like space of his own in the church lot. On his first day Ware meets Jolene, a tough, secretive girl planting a garden in the rubble of an abandoned church next to the camp. But then his parents sign him up for dreaded Rec camp, where he must endure Meaningful Social Interaction and whatever activities so-called “normal” kids do. Ware can’t wait to spend summer “off in his own world”-dreaming of knights in the Middle Ages and generally being left alone. From the author of the highly acclaimed, New York Times bestselling novel Pax comes a gorgeous and moving middle grade novel that is an ode to introverts, dreamers, and misfits everywhere.

Sara pennypacker here in the real world