Meeting a new story is already a great success, because hackneyed stories come across more and more. But Sarah Pennypacker, the author of the famous "Pax" and "Clementine", is a real great writer, so she has no need to rehash, she already has something to tell the world.
Summer has arrived, and with it a daily visit to a boring city camp - the holidays of eleven-year-old Var promise to be dreary. Also, not everything is in order at home: the grandmother is very sick, the parents work very hard, and there are many complaints against Var. And Var is a dreamer and an introvert, he doesn’t want fun or the company of other people. He is a fan of the Middle Ages, he would like to read about knights and castles in silence.
It is completely unbearable for Var to play outdoor games with unfamiliar children and establish social contacts, so he only pretends that he visits the camp every day, but in reality. goes to the temple! Joke. It’s not in that sense that he goes to church. It’s just that there is an abandoned church next to the camp, and the church is masonry, fortress walls, stained glass windows, a well - here you can hide from the real world and dream that you are a knight and this is your castle. Fantasies take shape, and Var begins to little by little change the landscape, build, remodel.
Here someone else comes onto the stage. Girl. The same unsociable, detached from the world loner, like Var. She also has her own way of escapism: she intends to grow and sell papayas. On an industrial scale. For what? But because not everything is ok at home either, and she has big plans for these papayas. The conflict is that Jolene and Var both claim the same territory and are not ready to tolerate each other on it.
There are no breathtaking adventures in the book; on the contrary, everything happens slowly here. The focus is on how Var comes up with the design and engineering solutions to build his castle; the way Jolene fusses with those papayas; and, of course, the inner world and relationships of the characters, which are slowly transformed following the physical changes around them.
Having gone through rejection, confrontation, and irritation, children still find a common denominator, and through cooperation they come to mutual sympathy. And the story of escapism turns into a story of accepting reality and, most importantly, finding one’s place in it.
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