Jake Yoder, a precocious boy caught between Amish culture and the modern world, sits in his sixth-grade classroom writing stories at the behest of a stern but charismatic teacher. His stories feature children who are crushed, imprisoned, and distorted, yet flailing around with a kind of bedazzled awe, trying to find their way out. His characters traverse South American plains, fenced-in farms, exotic cities; find themselves in mental institutions, one-room schoolhouses, prisons; his sentences appear constructed to the beat of an obsessive internal rhythm.

The disturbing shifts in Jake's tales and their strange internal logic reveal a young boy processing emotional experiences in the wake of his mother's suicide and his own proximity to the schoolroom shootings at Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, in 2006. Jake imagines fantastic journeys, magical transformations, and rock stardom as alternatives, it seems, to his own grim reality and the limitations of his life among the Amish.

What emerges is "a twisty, turny, funny, damning fairy tale that happened ­neither long ago nor far away but every day and here" (Rebecca Brown).