FernFolio

Sent to spend the summer on the west coast with his Gran and four girls cousins while his mother honeymoons with her new husband, twelve year-old Kip finds himself rather overwhelmed by this first meeting with his extended family. Since her big, rambling house by the sea is due to be torn down at the end of the summer, Gran encourages Kip and the girls to express themselves, by decorating its walls with lists in magic marker and poems and maps of mythical places, and by anticipating its destruction by taking a hammer to the doors and plastered walls.
Kip is delighted to win his first choice of places to sleep in the room lottery, the attic space in which he finds sequences of numbers painted around light fixtures and doorways in his dead father’s careful printing. When he finds an old three-ringed binder hidden away on the top shelf of a cupboard and recognises his father’s writing, Kip realises that, through the story told in the binder’s pages, he is going to be able to spend a summer with the father who died in a traffic accident when he was still very small.
Odd Man Out is a warm and funny and thought-provoking tale about family, about growing up and about saying good-bye to things and people we love.
FernFolio Editor