This is a very unusual story. The protagonist is a 12-year-old boy named Zippy, who lives with his grandparents in a Michigan small town. Zippy doesn't know his father, Buckeye, who left town years ago and has not returned.
Zippy is different from most kids in many ways. First, he has pathological myopia, a condition that means he is legally blind. He can see things up close, but farther than that everything is a big blur. Zippy is also a compulsive list maker who lists almost everything he does and thinks about in notebooks. Writing in the notebooks helps Zippy to relax--without them he suffers from serious anxiety attacks.
Life with his grandparents is pretty happy, except for the fact that Zippy has no friends. It is summer and he is spending his time helping Gramps and Gran around the house and at their antique store. Then one day Buckeye turns up. He leaves a box in the garage in which they find a mysterious, old notebook. Being a big fan of notebooks, Zippy decides to try and figure out just what this one is and who made it. It appears to be a log of a sea journey made a long time ago.
I don't want to give anything away, but suffice it to say that the notebook turns out to be very interesting and valuable, AND there is a bad guy who wants it. In the course of the story Zippy makes a friend and finds courage he didn't knew he had. I enjoyed the story a lot, although the ending wraps up a bit too neatly for me. Zippy is a quirky, endearing character who is fun to get to know.
