Wiffle Ball Summer

After spending 20 years of his life “somewhere amidst the cornfield blanket of a vast Buckeye nowhere," Geoffrey Arthur Drewyor left the modest village of Elmore, Ohio and bounced around the East Coast of the United States for the next half decade. Then in 2005, he found himself in London's Kensington Gardens daydreaming about his former home and began to wonder how different it would look now that he had spent time living in Florida, Boston, New York and the UK. When the time came to decide how he would explore that home, a long, yellow piece of plastic - a WIFFLE Ball bat - offered itself as the guiding force, and the journey was on.

Writing in the vein of rollicking nomadic bestsellers such as "A Walk in the Woods" and "Round Ireland with a Fridge," Drewyor reveals the character of the Midwest while spinning the tires of his grandmother-style bicycle through the country lanes and town centers of his native home. Along the way he manages to avoid fire, flood, and pestilence, but nearly everything else comes into play including a man named Squirrel, a town called Knockemstiff, and a bearded country boy who vents his frustration by urinating on motel doors. By night, the adventures continue as Drewyor sleeps under picnic tables, battles hordes of mosquitoes, and takes refuge in abandoned and undoubtedly haunted farm sheds. But the true test of his journey – and of his young life – is right around the corner, and the wandering Elmoron never sees it coming.

Wiffle Ball Summer will remind anyone who has ever spent a moment in a small town exactly what that experience was about.

It also serves as a warning that when you return there, things might not be exactly how you remember them.