The Hike to Home
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
In this fun middle grade adventure, a young girl and her two new friends brave the wilderness to find a castle, prove a local legend, and discover the true meaning of home.
Lin Moser is not looking forward to this summer. After living on the road all her life, hiking mountains and traveling through the country in an RV with her house-flipping parents, she’s now stuck in Newbridge, New Jersey for their longest stay yet. With Mom away on a year-long naturalist assignment, Lin has resigned herself to having the most boring summer ever. But then she finds out about a local legend: an ancient ruined castle in the woods that no one has been able to find. Hiking to this castle would be like a quest. . . such an amazing quest that Mom might even come home, and they could adventure together the way they used to.
Determined to create her own adventure, Lin sets off on her biggest one yet—braving the wilderness with her two new friends, seeking the castle, and maybe discovering a new idea of home along the way.
With her trademark humor and heart, Jess Rinker delivers a story of adventure and growing up in The Hike to Home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stuck in Newbridge, N.J., with her father while her mother participates in a yearlong film residency in the Dry Tortugas, 12-year-old Melinda "Lin" Moser feels miserable. She's spent years traveling the country as part of her parents' popular YouTube home renovation show, Moseying with the Mosers, and resents being left behind. Ditching summer camp for her own film project, Lin becomes determined to find and film Pen's Castle, a rumored local haunt off the Appalachian Trail with purported roots in Arthurian legend and connections to Freemasonry. Along the way, she also hopes to prove that she—like both her mother and 19th-century mountaineer Annie Smith Peck, the subject of a book her mom sends her—is a true adventurer. Alongside musical theater enthusiast Tinsley Cooper, whose father is recovering from a work accident at local Sanders Construction, and bookish Leo Martin, bullied by another Sanders, Lin searches for clues about the castle while concocting a plan to spend two days hiking and filming in the woods. Rinker (The Dare Sisters) packs themes and plot points into a novel whose real strength is its characters; if the story sometimes bogs down as a result, the white-cued kids' rapport and significant emotional arcs satisfy. Ages 8–12.
