Fox is the teenage son of a single mom who has grown up poor and transient until he arrives in Orange, California, with his first chance at a sense of belonging. There he meets Axel, an eccentric loner with a hyperactive imagination who introduces him to the fenced off no-manâs land of a riverbed that winds through the suburban neighborhood where they live. There fantasy and reality collide in the stories they invent, the games they play, and the powers they resist.
When Axel gets into trouble with the authoritarian pastor of his church, he runs away both for real and into his own fantasies. Fox goes looking for him in more ways than one, accompanied by his friend Angel, a Latinx girl with a critical mind and a singular sense of justice. What they all end up finding is the courage to be themselves and to care for one another in a world that doesnât much value either.
Fox is the teenage son of a single mom who has grown up poor and transient until he arrives in Orange, California, with his first chance at a sense of belonging. There he meets Axel, an eccentric loner with a hyperactive imagination who introduces him to the fenced off no-manâs land of a riverbed that winds through the suburban neighborhood where they live. There fantasy and reality collide in the stories they invent, the games they play, and the powers they resist.
When Axel gets into trouble with the authoritarian pastor of his church, he runs away both for real and into his own fantasies. Fox goes looking for him in more ways than one, accompanied by his friend Angel, a Latinx girl with a critical mind and a singular sense of justice. What they all end up finding is the courage to be themselves and to care for one another in a world that doesnât much value either.
Fox Solis was a solitary and self-contained person. He learned early to tread lightly on this earth. He hadnât had much of a choice. His father, who disappeared before he could remember, left him and his mother Sylvie, a seventeen-year-old high school dropout, to fend for themselves. Foxâs earliest memories were of unfamiliar rooms with clocks that ticked as if he wasnât there, long lines in lobbies of social service offices, checkout girls impatiently waiting while his mother pulled out wads of food stamps. She always seemed to be working jobs a long bus ride away, fighting with landlords and avoiding creditors. Things would get so bad she couldnât stand it anymore and theyâd just bolt, hoping for a new start someplace else. After a while running from troubles became their path of least resistance, and they rarely stayed anywhere long. Fox used to drag with him a box of ragtag things, a photograph of a Native American man, a colored paper lamp, and so on, hoping theyâd connect each new wall or bare light bulb with what came before. They never really did. He went to bed most nights sensing around him ghosts of other people just as temporary as he was.Â
But things had started to turn around for them. His mother, graduating from a technical school with a degree in business administration, landed a good job as an agent at an escrow company in Orange. It meant more money than sheâd ever made in her life. They moved into a two-bedroom apartment on the upper story of a duplex, which gave them four whole walls to themselves, just as in a house. A massive bougainvillea bush stood outside the kitchen window and shaded a back porch big enough for a cafe table and a barbecue grill. The building had its own washer and dryer so they wouldnât have to go to a laundromat anymore, and it came with a carport. The landlord even allowed them to have a cat. All together it spelled a welcome reprieve from their former skittish existence, maybe even an end to the rootlessness that had been their lot for so long. Fox for one wouldnât have minded making forays out from the brakes and hedges of his heart every now and again.
Central to this prospect would be his friendship with Axel Acher. They met on his first day at Peralta Junior High, where he arrived, as usual, right in the middle of the school year. The principal presented him to his new home room, and the teacher, Mr. Disher, assigned him a desk opposite Axel. The rest of the class laughed under their breaths at this apparent misfortune. Axel was clearly a pariah. Tall and uncoordinated, with a head the shape of an adze tapering through a gaunt jaw to a chin almost grafted onto his Adamâs apple, large hands and pale skin, he cut the perfect image of the gawky loser no one wanted to be, prompting a hatred that Fox could tell was instinctive and without remorse.
When he sat down Axel was hunched over a frayed, much fingered paperback of Tolkienâs The Two Towers. He wore an English flat cap made of faded black-gray herringbone and a suede jacket tagged all over with words. They were drawn in ornate cursives, cuneiform wedges, and stenciled serifs, and swarmed so thick on cuffs, sleeves, fronts, and pockets that they didnât look like themselves anymore, but gaseous nebulae of torn and mashed together letters.Â
Fox, fearing to disturb his new classmateâs concentration, eased his desktop open and carefully stowed his notebooks and pencils beneath. Axel didnât bother to look up.
That morning the class went on a field trip to the beach. Mr. Disher drove in his own car, leaving his wards to the supervision of a bus driver named Bert, an anxious man with shifty eyes and a resentful personality. No one allowed Axel to sit or even stand near them on the bus, and Bert refused to let him cross the yellow line by the front door. He had to shuttle up and down the aisle for the entire tripâa fate to which it appeared he was no stranger. Bert was also his regular bus driver and some of the other kids had made his exile a customary practice.
They arrived at Crystal Cove State Park, a stretch of open coastland between the towns of Corona del Mar and Laguna Beach in southern Orange County. From a parking lot the class walked along a wood-plank pathway through a meadow to the crest of a cliff. A slowly descending trail led them to the beach. They headed to tidepools nestled in the grooves of an exposed reef, where Mr. Disher held forth on the biology of hermit crabs and sea anemones.Â
At lunchtime they were allowed to wander off on their own. Most kids sat on a stone outcropping studded with clam borings and prehistoric shell deposits. Presently Axel appeared on the beach below carrying a piece of weathered driftwood he had found. It was nine feet tall and wound about with kelp like a caduceus. Ignoring the amphitheater of kids behind him, he dug a hole in the sand expansive enough to accommodate its more bulbous extremity, once a root system of some kind. It took a while but eventually he got the whole thing to stand upright. He then sat cross-legged inside a circle he drew around it and faced the ocean, eating his lunch out of a paper bag.
Before long Fox noticed his hunched back begin to convulse with laughter. He made a series of gestures that accompanied an agitated apostrophe to the sea. This was too much for the others.Â
âWhat a retard!â a boy yelled from the outcropping.
âYouâre freaking my funk, dude!â
Axel pretended not to hear what they were saying.Â
âDork!â
âDick-wad!â
âYouâre ruining the view!â
Danny Kemp, a hormonal prodigy with five oâclock shadow and hair on his chest, took matters into his own hands. He jumped down and stalked across the sand toward Axel, who sprang to his feet and cried out in bizarre parody of medieval English:
âCross not this circle where I am herborowed, infidel!âÂ
âJust go somewhere else all right, jerk-off?â said Danny, closing in.
âCome not one toadâs length more, cretin, or I shall wreak upon thee great servage and pilling!â He pulled out the driftwood and pointed it at his adversary.Â
Danny halted. âWhat did you call me?â A glance over his shoulder brought a number of other boys, like eager members of a gang, leaping down the rocks to his side.Â
âBeware this fiendish serpent!â cried Axel, struggling to hold up the driftwood.Â
The boys surrounded him. To keep them at bay Axel swung the driftwood in broad sweeping circles. The other kids cheered on his assailants, who darted in and out with big grins on their faces, looking for openings. Axel turned and turned, growing dizzy, until finally he succumbed to exhaustion and collapsed.Â
Danny grabbed him by the lapels of his suede jacket and lifted him to his feet. No one called him a cretin (whatever that was) and got away with it. He shoved the offender and punched him in the stomach. Axel fell doubled over. Everyone erupted in hoots and catcalls. They gave in to the kind of collective impulse, furtive and vaguely licentious, that incited kids to do unspeakable things when they thought they could get away with it. Another boy kicked Axel in the back. Others spit and poured sand on him. Everyone might have taken their turn were it not that Bert lumbered down the beach to call them back to the tidepools. He broke up the proceedings before they could gain much momentum, although not because he liked Axel any more than the rest of them. Only the accidents of age and authority, Fox suspected, kept him from chiming in on that wavelength of primitive spite, even adding a kick or two of his own.Â
People tore themselves away from the spectacle and left Axel crumpled on the beach. Sand infested his clothes and clotted the tears that streaked his face. Only Fox stayed behind. He had stood by as usual, keeper of distances that he was, too self-conscious as the new kid to interfere. He didnât know what to think of Axelâs willful provocations, but it touched his heart to see him clutching his knees and staring off like a marionette doll tangled in his strings. He knelt down on the sand and inquired if he was all right. Axel said nothing.
Fox decided the best approach would be the honest one. âWhy did you do that?â he asked him.
Axel sat up and grabbed his cap, which had fallen off. He startled Fox by how completely he forgot his former humiliation. In a moment Fox saw how little other people mattered to him.Â
âDo what?â he said, fitting the cap back on his head.
âYou know, draw attention to yourself that way.â
Axel pondered the question, squinching the lean muscles of his face into a frown. At last he scratched his temple and said, âI didnât think anybody could see me.â
âBut everybody could see you!â Fox exclaimed.Â
Axel nodded. That really seemed not to have occurred to him.
Bert came huffing down the beach a second time, his gelatinous belly sloshing around his broad hips. âMove your butts!â he commanded, and, under his breath but still loud enough to be heard, he couldnât resist adding: âYou little shits.â
Fox helped Axel to his feet, and together they started back to the tidepools. An offshore wind refreshed their faces, and the blue day sparkled all around them. Axel was still trying to sort out the mystery of his own insensibility as they went.
âThe world isnât what you think it is, is it?â he observed.
âIt can surprise you if you donât watch out.â
âWhatâs inside is not the same as whatâs outside.â Axel paused, gazing over the ocean, lost in vague dissatisfaction with this thought. A mass of cumulus clouds sat above the ridgeline of a hazy Catalina Island. Walking there like Admiral Peary to the North Pole, he mur-mured, âSometimes you have to step out of your own mind.â
Fox wasnât so sure about that, but he let it stand without comment. It gave Axel an idea. He picked up a piece of chert from the sand, ran back to the base of the stone outcropping, and began to scrape against its porous surface. Fox came up behind and watched him inscribe the letters L-O-G-O-M-A-C-H-Y. He had no idea what that meant. When he asked, Axel said, âA war with words.â
In this fantasy tale, two misfits, Fox, the new kid, and Axel, an eccentric imaginative loner, become friends when Fox arrives at his new school. Axel shares his favorite hiding place, the riverbed that runs through their neighborhood in Orange County, California. There, the duo bonds over imaginary and real adventures. When Axelâs parents, evangelical Christians, think his imagination has gone too far, his father takes him to a retreat. Axel, fearing for his life, runs away. Fox, with the help of his friend Angel and Axelâs sister, spends the next few weeks searching for his missing friend.Â
Axelâs run-away imagination often transports the reader, and Fox to a high fantasy realm. The back and forth of Axelâs imagination can be disorienting and frustrating. At one point Fox asks âWhere was the point past which even Axel could not come back? Did it resemble this construction site? He wanted to shake his friend free from his illusions for once.â (Chapter 9 Mimema) Â
The friendship forged feels almost one-sided and Axel comes across as paranoid or a split personality. Axel remains a loner through the entire book, allowing Fox to tag along on his adventures. He has no other friends at school and often refers to himself as Axalax. Even Fox recognizes the difference in his friend; sometimes alternating between calling him Axel or Axalax, mentioning personality differences between the two identities, or when in Axalaxâs presence, wondering when Axel will return. This back and forth, the idea of two different people, makes it difficult for the reader to maintain the illusion of magic and not mental illness. Maybe that is intentional.Â
Some readers may struggle with the vocabulary. There are many words related to geography, geology, and waterways, along with higher vocabulary words and made-up words of Axelâs fantasylands. Reading it with dictionary enabled is helpful but may often leave the reader wondering, âWhy didnât they just say that?â, even if they enjoy a challenging read.Â
This is not a beach read. It is darker than the synopsis sounds. Those who enjoy magical realism or fantasy stories for hidden glimpses of the human condition, madness, and our interactions with the world around us, will find this an engaging read. It is also full of geological and regional (Orange California) waterway history.