Outside Nowhere
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From the author of The Midnight Brigade, this heartwarming and humorous middle grade novel follows one boy's summer adventure at a peculiar farm in the middle of nowhere.
Charming and funny, Parker Kelbrook can wriggle out of anything he doesn’t want to do. So when he’s forced to take a job at the local pool—a threat to his beach-filled summer plans—he comes up with the perfect prank to get himself fired.
Once Parker’s father catches wind of his latest scheme, he decides enough is enough, and Parker is sent halfway across the country to work on a farm alongside five other kids who find him less than charming. As Parker learns to roll up his sleeves and keep his head down, strange things start happening. And after he awakens one morning to find a seventeen-hundred-pound dairy cow on the roof of a barn, he suspects that something magical and mysterious is growing in the farm’s fields.
Adam Borba presents a whimsical new story about a boy’s discovery that mistakes and miracles can have serious consequences.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When Parker Kelbrook is fired on his first day as a junior lifeguard at his local Pittsburgh pool, having "managed to pour the… entire supply of Purple Madness Fruit Punch Mix off the high board," he looks forward to having "a life-affirming amount of fun" by spending the summer at a friend's Outer Banks beach house. After his father and a close family friend instead pack him off to a remote Topeka-area farm, and Parker manages to leave his belongings on the train, he finds the bunk house rustic and the cultivars curious: they're "hope and second chances," he's told, plus radishes that the workers are forbidden to taste. While Parker learns how to work hard and take responsibility, he also begins to witness odd happenings: a goat floating in the air, and a cow on the bunkhouse roof. Building out Parker's myriad affectations—formal speech, a freewheeling and privileged manner, and vintage style—Borba (The Midnight Brigade) conjures a sympathetic, brittle-feeling character primed for personal growth. Blended with a quirky, fable-like third-person narrative, the farm's magical and mysterious elements build to an intriguing novel with a strong emotional core. Characters present as white. Final art not seen by PW. Ages 8–12.
