The year is 1950, and in a small town on Cape Cod twenty-six-year-old librarian Peggy Cort feels like love and life have stood her up. Until the day James Carlson Sweattthe over-tall eleven-year-old boy whos the talk of the townwalks into her library and changes her life forever. Two misfits whose lonely paths cross at the circulation desk, Peggy and James are odd candidates for friendship, but nevertheless they soon find their lives entwined in ways that neither one could have predicted. In James, Peggy discovers the one person whos ever really understood her, and as he growssix foot five at age twelve, then seven feet, then eightso does her heart and their most singular romance.