His father decides to settle briefly, in a town, where Christy and his cousin can receive proper schooling and prepare for their first communions. The wandering life is the only one Christy has ever known, but when his grandfather dies, everything changes. Christy carries with him a burden of guilt as well, haunted by the story of his mother’s death in childbirth. Ireland, 1959: Young Christopher Hurley is a tinker, a Pavee gypsy, who roams with his father and extended family from town to town, carrying all their worldly possessions in their wagons. Luca can smell the wood of the fire, the cocoa and cinnamon of the chilate, and that's how he knows Rebeca is magical, because she can transport him a thousand miles away into her own mountain homestead just by the sound of her voice.The Outside Boy is a poignant, coming of age novel about an Irish gypsy boy’s childhood in the 1950’s from Jeanine Cummins, the national bestselling author of A Rip in Heaven and American Dirt. He's there, far away in the misty cloud forest, in a hut with a packed dirt floor and a cool breeze, with Rebeca and Soledad and their mami and abuela, and he can even see their father, far away down the mountain and through the streets of that clogged, enormous city, wearing a long apron and a chef's hat, and his pockets full of dried herbs.

And at night there was the sound of the tree frogs and the music of the rushing water from the falls and all the songs of the night birds, and Mami would make the most delicious chilate, and Abuela would sing to us in the old language, and Soledad and I would gather herbs and dry them and bundle them for Papi to sell in the market when he had a day off, and that's how we passed our days.' And there were waterfalls everywhere with big rock pools where you could take a bath and the water was always warm and it smelled like sunlight. And when it rain you could hear the big, fat raindrops splatting onto those giant leaves, and you could only see the sky in bright blue patches if you were walking a long way off to a friend's house or to church or something, when you passed through a clearing and all those leaves would back away and open up and the hot sunshine would beat down all yellow and gold and sticky. Because the trees had these enormous dark green leaves, as a big as a bed, and they would sway in the wind.

And we loved it anyway even before we knew. We didn't really know that then, because it was the only place we'd ever seen, except in picture in books and magazines, but now that's I've seen other place, I know. “This place, our little cloud forest, even though we missed our papi, it was the most beautiful place you've ever seen.

The Outside Boy by Jeanine Cummins