Seventeen-year-old Olivia hasn't seen her father since she was eight months old. But when he summons her out of the blue, Olivia travels cross country to New Hampshire to meet him. That summer, she learns to adapt to rural life and to try to understand her reclusive father. The next summer, following high school graduation, she returns to recreate her father's seventy-mile annual bike ride-reflecting on her own personal journey to understand the true meaning of love and kinship. When Olivia is summoned by her father, a man she barely remembers, to determine whether she is worthy of inheriting his legacy, she embarks on a personal odyssey that teaches her the true meaning of love and kinship. "Fleishman's gift for packing each sentence with both obvious and reflective meaning is evident here. The adolescent view is intelligent, mature, and believable." "The skill with which Fleischman creates the characters of Olivia and her writer father Hannibal and with which he evokes the rural New Hampshire setting are occasions for joy and celebration and can only be matched by the extraordinary felicity of his prose style."

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