Twelve-year-old sweat-averse Joey is psyched for his summer of relaxation and perfecting his butt-shaped indentation on the couch, although he wishes that his best friend, Xander, wasn’t always busy with his new cross-country team.

This novel is well-paced, the characters feel very real and the writing is gripping, especially the descriptive passages.

Leo hefted a worn gray backpack onto his shoulders. It had about 600 pockets and pouches, plus straps that he clasped around his waist and chest. He wore brown hiking boots, cargo shorts and a soft blue button-down shirt rolled up at the elbows. He looked like he’d done this “hike a mountain” thing before. I had on basketball shorts, my Italia jersey, and beat-up Converse.

The plot is certainly interesting, especially for readers beset by body-image concerns and open to insight into how a relationship changes when poor health plagues a friend in gradual downward spiral.

That said, the main character Joey spends much of the novel feeling sorry for himself. Naturally, a heavy, unathletic boy may have self-confidence problems, and a protagonist needs a character arc, which Joey achieves in the end. But some readers will tire of the pity party before he changes; it verges on overdone.

I looked like the kind of guy who’d perfected a butt-shaped indentation for himself on his couch… If something happened on the trail, if he got hurt, I’d already proven that I was useless… I was used to being a B-minus kid.

Besides their differences in preparedness for adventure, both mentally and physically, Joey and Leo are both dealing with grief from their grandfather’s death two years previous, in quite different ways, and without communicating about it with each other till near the end. It’s touching when they do finally open up:

A piece of me that I had locked up tight two years ago opened up. It was like a Pandora’s Box of feelings that I had stubbornly held on to: grief, guilt, regret and anger. I didn’t need that box anymore. Leo had helped me see that.

As for the writing, it generally shines but occasionally feels a little amateurish, especially the sometimes-fumbling metaphors, often assigned an Italian-food theme (which are somewhere between amusing and trying too hard and too often).

A hug from Nonna was like being wrapped in a piece of focaccia bread pulled straight from the oven… My chest suddenly ached, as if Nonna were pounding it like pizza dough. For a woman who wasn’t even five feet tall, my grandmother had the arm strength of Thor.

But character traits are consistent and appealing, the arcs are well delivered and emotions are written with true deftness and skill.

As I knew it would, guilt crept into my throat. Swallowing became painful. I had tried so hard for two years to bury the mental picture of our grandfather lying lifeless on the sand. But the memory of that day at the lake always resurfaced, demanding that I remember every detail. Every. Awful. Detail.

Body-image issues, grief and a companion hit with health issues, plus a spot of romance: It’s a lot to pack into one novel, but enjoyable right to the triumphant end.
– Pam Withers