Eleven-year-old Tom Hammond has always lived next to Leepike Ridge. He never imagined he might end up lost beneath it!
But that's exactly what happens the night Tom's schoolteacher comes to dinner and asks Tom's widowed mother to marry him. Angry and embarrassed, Tom slips out of the house and escapes down a nearby stream on a floating slab of refrigerator packing foam. The night and stars lull Tom to sleep, and when he wakes, he finds he has ridden his foam raft all the way to ridge itself—where the stream dives underground! Pulled down with it, Tom is flung over rapids and tossed through chasms until finally, miraculously, he comes to rest, sore but alive. What Tom finds under Leepike Ridge—a corpse, a dog, a flashlight, a castaway, crawdads, four graves, a tomb, and buried treasure—will answer questions he hadn't known to ask and change his life forever. Now if he can only find his way home again. . . .
An original mix of Robinson Crusoe, King Solomon's Mines, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and The Odyssey, N. D. Wilson's first book for young readers is a remarkable adventure, a journey though the dark of the grave and back out into the light.
"Surprising, yet seamlessly executed. While Leepike Ridge is primarily an adventure story involving murder, treachery, and betrayal, Wilson's rich imagination and his quirky characters are a true delight."—School Library Journal
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