How Can a Kid Today Hear His Inner Voice?

Children’s Books When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. Kids’ lives are loud. Shouts and songs from YouTube and TikTok compete with the rattle and thumps of swing sets and basketball courts, and that’s just on the outside. Anxiety about missing out and keeping up clamors within at all hours.

In HERE IN THE REAL WORLD (Balzer + Bray, 308 pp. , $17. 99; ages 8 to 12), Sara Pennypacker’s captivating new novel, 11-year-old Ware pushes back against the hubbub by taking a stand for silence, discovering his true calling along the way. It was supposed to be the best summer of his life.

While his parents were working double shifts in order to earn enough money to buy their rental house, Ware was going to stay with his grandmother, known as Big Deal, and meditatively build a model castle on her dining room table. But when Big Deal falls and requires a hip replacement and a hospital stay, Ware is banished to summer “Rec” at the local community center. He knows “Rec” is just “another name for day care, with heat rash and humiliation thrown in free. ” Ware can’t bear the thought of being trapped within the Rec’s concrete walls, with “chipped paint the color of Band-Aids,” while being subjected to the “high-pitched roar” of the other kids.

So he slips away into the abandoned lot next door. And that’s when summer takes an astonishing turn. The lot holds a half-demolished church, a flattened playground and a container papaya garden, tended by a crabby girl named Jolene.

“Despite Jolene’s sullen presence, the lot is an oasis to Ware, and he starts skipping Rec to visit, unbeknown to his harried parents.”

At first, Jolene rebuffs Ware’s optimistic assertions that they can make the lot their own, claiming he lives in “Magic Fairness Land” while she’s still “here in the real world. ” But despite their contradictory natures, the two work together to create a ramshackle Eden, complete with life-size castle, moat and garden, out of the church’s broken walls and razed ground. The long hours spent constructing their make-believe monarchy and forming a friendship are deeply healing. Ware is working through the effects of overhearing his more socially skilled parents wonder, “Why can’t we have a normal kid?