Because he once ate a worm when he was seven, Will got nicknamed Worm and it stuck. He sometimes makes dumb mistakes, gets stuck on details nobody else notices, and is easily distracted- so people don’t take him very seriously. But now his father seems to be having a crisis, and Worm is determined to go along when his older brother runs away to help their father. Their parents are living apart, the two boys have been forbidden to visit their father but not told exactly why. It sounds like he’s emotionally unstable. When they hear a rumor at school about his increasingly strange behavior, they decide to do something now. To just walk across town to his house. They estimate it will take about three days, cutting through patches of woods between neighborhoods, following a creek. It’s not nearly as easy as they imagined. It’s damp and muggy, they run out of food, encounter older nasty kids who steal their supplies, and one of them gets injured. But Worm also finds he can be resourceful and tougher than anyone expected. And even though they part ways after an argument, both make it to their goal. Worm is devastated to find out that all his earlier denial and protests (about their father’s state of mental health) were in vain- his father really is struggling, and admits to more serious problems in the past than Worm had been aware of. The boys just being there won’t make things better. But they do help some. (I was rather horrified at the bagel scene though. I almost had to stop reading the end of the book).
I live near the area this story takes place in, and have to say the setting rang really true for me. The humidity and bogginess in the woods, the patches of trees between neighborhoods that pretty much nobody but kids go into. I was tempted to look up some of the street names and see if I could actually trace their path, but never bothered. The cover image doesn’t really match the locale though- stream banks don’t have wide flat pebbly banks, and the trees are mostly deciduous. It’s much more dense growth right up to where it drops into the water, making walking along a creek actually difficult (as was depicted in the text quite well). I think reading a book about a place I could picture so clearly was part of what made it a good read, that plus the survival aspect of the story.
