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It’s easy to fall off the face of the Earth, as the affable 15-year-old Ry discovers when he misses his camp-bound train somewhere in Montana. It wouldn’t be so traumatic if his parents weren’t adrift in the Caribbean, his grandpa in Wisconsin hadn’t plunged into a sinkhole and all potentially helpful cell phones weren’t either dead, out of range or stolen by a green-hued jungle monkey. Ry’s efforts to get somewhere from the middle of nowhere form the core of this poetic, ebullient odyssey, Perkins’s first novel since her Newbery-winning Criss Cross (2005). Three tales in three-plus locales (and the occasional dog-centric comic strip) weave a playfully inventive, even suspenseful narrative peppered with colorful characters and close calls. Details of, say, a cactus lamp or a fly’s flight are vividly and often humorously described in a fresh, intimate, mostly third-person voice, frequently interrupted with almost conversational attempts to clarify and refine observations. A long, immensely enjoyable, curiously comforting ramble through an absurd-but-benign world, tellingly filed by the Library of Congress under “Adventure and adventurers—Fiction,” “Accidents—Fiction” and “Luck—Fiction.” (Fiction. 12 & up)
