The best Middle Grade fiction book I’ve read that was published in 2020. Sara Pennypacker, author of Pax and the beloved Clementine books and an adult novel set in Germany during WWII that I liked very much, has hit a home run with this story. “What does it take to be a hero?” says the cover teaser. But I’m not sure that heroics are more than a minor theme in the book. I got a much different message or set of messages and inspirations.

Ware is happy spending the summer at his grandmother’s senior living apartment complex where he can mostly be left alone to dream of knights and castles and whatever else he wants to think about. Other people think he’s “zoned out” and in need of “Meaningful Social Interaction”, but Grandma, called Big Deal by the family, is good at letting Ware be Ware, not expecting him to be “normal” like his parents do. Unfortunately for Ware, his summer of dreams gets cut short, and his parents sign him up for another summer at the REC. When Ware skips out on the summer program at the REC and meets a tough and fierce gardener named Jolene in the vacant lot next door, the two children begin as enemies but soon make a truce so that they can try to work together to save Jolene’s garden and the old shell of a church that has become Ware’s castle.

I like misfit, dreamy kids. I like misfit, tough, realist kids. I like secret hideouts and hidden gardens and the growth that happens in them. I liked the pitting of a dreamer against a hardheaded realist and how neither is completely right or completely wrong about the world and the ending of the story. Jolene accuses Ware over and over again of living in “Magic Fairness Land” whereas she’s sure that the real world isn’t fair and it’s no use expecting it to be so. Ware thinks maybe Jolene is a little too much of a realist while he doubts his own tendency to be always “off in his own world” and oblivious to present circumstances. Maybe, he thinks, he should be more normal as his parent seem to want him to be, or maybe he’s right to have a a little more hope and imagination than the normal, average kid.

Jolene knew how the world worked. She was usually right. Still, he hoped she was wrong this time.

“The real world is also all the things we do about the bad stuff. We’re the real world, too.” ~Ware

“It’s like this: artists see something that moves us, we need to take it in, make it part of ourselves. And then give it back to the world, translated, in a way the world can see it, too.” ~Ware’s Uncle Cy

“Don’t ask to be normal. You’re already better than that.” ~Jolene

There’s just so much to talk about in this book and so much to think about. The story reminded me a little bit of Bridge to Terebithia by Katharine Paterson, because of the friendship and the secret spaces, but (SPOILER!) no one dies! And even if things don’t turn out exactly how Ware imagines and hopes they might, Jolene worst predictions don’t come true completely either. With the marked absence of cell phones and computers and social media and tech in general, except for a simple movie camera that Ware learns to wield, Here in the Real World gives readers a time out from that particular technology-driven real world and time to explore the world of creativity and art and imagination that the child in all of us longs for.