Summerland

The next morning, Ethan wakes to the fox creature sitting on his chest. He introduces himself as a 756-year-old werefox named Cutbelly who’s there “to offer you everlasting fame and a fantastic destiny” (36). Cutbelly leads Ethan to the Tree of Worlds, a great invisible tree that holds all of existence on its leaves. Cutbelly is a shadowtail—a creature that can jump between leaves and across the four trunks that separate the four worlds. After one such leap, the two arrive in a leaf in the Summerlands, which is home to a miniature baseball field and the toddler-sized faeries who play there.

Ethan has been chosen as the baseball champion to protect the Summerlands from Coyote, the ancient trickster god who wanders the Tree of Worlds and destroys connections between worlds. However, Ethan’s baseball skills are not nearly good enough for the game he must play. The faeries consult their oracle—a clam that spits water at a parchment with letters so that the faeries can translate. The prophecy reads “FELD IS THE WANTED ONE; FELD HAS THE STUFF HE NEEDS” (57). A raven swoops down and grabs the clam. Emboldened by the clam’s belief in him, Ethan hurls a baseball at the raven, hitting the bird square in the head. The raven drops the clam, which lands on Ethan and knocks him out.

Ethan wakes in his bedroom less than a minute after Cutbelly arrived and finds a small book on his pillow about playing the position of catcher in baseball. Since the death of Ethan’s mother, he and his dad continue the tradition of Saturday-morning pancakes, though Ethan’s dad is a terrible cook. Both to get out of eating the pancakes and because of the book, Ethan asks his dad if he might make a good catcher. His dad retrieves his old catcher’s mitt from a box. Normally, Ethan’s fingers get tangled up when he puts on catcher’s mitts, but this time, “his fingers slid into the proper slots without any trouble at all” (70).

Ethan’s dad is an engineer, and the two ride to Ethan’s baseball game in the airship he built, even though the sky over Summerland is dark and threatening. Jennifer T. and her dad see the ship approach, and he blames the ship for the dark skies. Angry at his words, Jennifer T. runs and catches the ship, climbing into the cockpit. She wants to take the ship and just keep going, but they land so that the game can start. Ethan’s team takes the lead. For once, he wants to play, though the coach doesn’t put him in. In the fifth inning, the game pauses for rain, and just as Ethan thinks the game will be called off, he hears singing from the trees, and a strange wind blows the rain away. Ethan is sure that the faeries are responsible.

When Ethan comes up to bat, he hits the ball on the first pitch. Jennifer T. gets tagged running to second, and her father confronts the umpire. When the umpire doesn’t budge, Jennifer T.’s dad yells for Ethan to argue. Scared, Ethan runs to hide under a picnic table. Jennifer T. also runs, but she goes to the site of an abandoned hotel. She likes it there because it feels like old magic, but now a construction crew has destroyed the place and its magic. Ethan arrives, and the two sit on a log to watch the crew. The man Ethan saw yesterday reappears. Jennifer T. recognizes him as Chiron Brown (a baseball recruiter who should be dead by now). Chiron gives Jennifer T. a ball and tells her to pitch with it in the next game. The kids ask Chiron what the construction crew is building. Gravely, he answers “they buildin’ theirself the end of the world” (93).

The next morning, Ethan and Jennifer T. meet to practice, each finding that they’re good at catching and pitching, respectively. Cutbelly arrives, injured, and escorts the kids to the place where Ethan played baseball with the faeries, which has been destroyed except for a swath of land by the water where Cinquefoil (the fairy leader) is fighting an army of ugly winged creatures. Ethan rushes to help, picking up a piece of wood the size of a baseball bat. The creatures take off their heads to throw them at Ethan, and (as if he’s playing baseball) Ethan hits a few of them until he’s knocked out. He wakes lying in the grass, but it’s too late to save Cinquefoil’s land. On the way back to the Middling (Ethan’s world), strange creatures of shadow stalk Ethan, Jennifer T., and Cutbelly. Ethan and Jennifer T. reach the Middling, but the creatures capture Cutbelly. The kids meet up with Chiron Brown, who tells Ethan not to blame himself for what happened to the faeries. Because of Coyote, the universe was always going to end, and “now it’s just happenin’ a little bit sooner” (110).

Realizing that they need to tell someone what’s happening, the kids consult Jennifer T.’s uncle. He has heard the tales of the universe ending and that a champion from the Middling could stop it. Long ago, Coyote resolved to destroy the places where stories come from so that he could destroy the great story of all creation. Once, the four worlds were connected. Coyote locked away the realm of the gods, and now only the Middling, Winterlands, and Summerlands are left. A well waters the Tree of Worlds, and Ethan and Jennifer T. must find it before Coyote spoils it. To do this, they’ll need another shadowtail, and they decide to recruit Thor Wignutt because he’s just strange enough to be such a creature.

While Jennifer T. visits Thor, Ethan goes home to tell his dad about the Summerlands and Coyote. However, both his father and the airship are gone. Ethan finds a business card from a man named Padfoot—a supposed investor in airship technologies. Cinquefoil arrives with Ethan’s catcher’s mitt and recognizes Padfoot as one of Coyote’s operatives. Ethan puts on a pair of sunglasses he finds and sees his father, blindfolded and imprisoned. Ethan accepts what he must do. He has already lost one parent, and “if he needed to save the universe to get the other one back, then he would” (129). Thinking about the airship and the clam’s prophecy, Ethan realizes that the “wanted one” named Feld is his dad, not him, and that Coyote needs the materials in the airship to poison the well.

Ethan rigs his dad’s station wagon to fly using an old prototype gas tank from when his dad was building the airship. Collecting what he’ll need from the house, including his dad’s wallet, the catcher’s mitt, the sunglasses (which Ethan realizes show what Padfoot is seeing), and the stick he used to help Cinquefoil in the fight (which Cinquefoil identifies as a piece of the Tree of the Worlds itself), the two fly back to Jennifer T.’s house. There, her uncle gives her an old book full of practical information on things like hunting and engine repair. She and Thor join Ethan and Cinquefoil in the car, and the group flies away.