Blog Tour: Outside Nowhere by Adam Borba (Interview!)

Happy Thursday and welcome to my stop on the blog tour for OUTSIDE NOWHERE! I’m so excited because today I have an interview with Adam Borba to share with you! This book is truly amazing and I’m so excited to for you to find out more about it!

Outside Nowhere by Adam Borba
Published on October 18, 2022 by Little Brown Books for Young Readers
Genres: Fantasy, Middle Grade
Pages: 272
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Author Links: Website, Twitter, Goodreads, Instagram

Charming and funny, Parker Kelbrook can wriggle out of anything he doesn’t want to do. So when he’s forced to take a job at the local pool—a threat to his beach-filled summer plans—he comes up with the perfect prank to get himself fired.
Once Parker’s father catches wind of his latest scheme, he decides enough is enough, and Parker is sent halfway across the country to work on a farm alongside five other kids who aren't his biggest fans. As Parker learns to roll up his sleeves and keep his head down, strange things start happening. And after he awakens one morning to find a seventeen-hundred-pound dairy cow on the roof of a barn, he suspects that something magical and mysterious is growing in the farm’s fields.

What would you do if you spent the day with Parker? Where would you go to eat, hang out, relax, etc.?

I’d love to hang out with Parker in his hometown of Pittsburgh. The kid knows how to have fun and he has the most fun when he’s in his element. Early in Outside Nowhere, we learn that Parker is notorious for pulling pranks. He does things like sneaking a pony into a movie theater or filling his gymnasium with balloons. Once he wrapped his science classroom in cellophane. Recently, he decorated his neighbor’s roof with a giant model of the solar system and invited his entire school to a semiformal dance at his vice principal’s house. It feels like we’d laugh the day away— and who couldn’t use that? Plus, Pittsburgh is a beautiful city, and while we’re there, we could eat pierogies (an Eastern European dumpling of sorts—and a food that makes an appearance in my first novel, The Midnight Brigade, about three kids who befriend a troll under a bridge in Pittsburgh).

If Parker were to hang out with other fictional characters, who would they be and why?

Excellent question! I’m assuming that if we’re magically transporting these characters across books (and decades) we can also make them the same age.

• Henry Huggins from Beverly Clearly’s Henry and Beezus series. Henry and Parker have gifts for getting themselves into trouble. My gut is they could pick each other’s brains about ways to get out.
• Miranda Sinclair from Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me. Miranda and Parker are city kids who have a knack for investigating mysteries – that just might be supernatural.
• Holden Caulfield from J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Because deep down Parker has a good heart and Holden needs some cheering up from someone he wouldn’t consider a phony. 

If there was one fictional place you could travel to for a day, where would it be and why?

Without question I’d travel to the farm where Parker is sent. There’s something special on the farm that all of us could use. I wish I could tell you what it is, but it’s a secret you’ll have to uncover by reading Outside Nowhere.

If you buried a time capsule with three items inside, what three items would you choose and why?

• A copy of Outside Nowhere. I try to avoid references to technology and pop culture in my books, with the hope that the stories will feel timeless for years to come.
• A nice bottle of wine. By the time we open it, fingers-crossed, we’ll have a great bottle of wine.
• A tube of lip balm. My wife is always misplacing hers, so I’m sure that whenever we dig up the capsule, she’ll need a new one.

What was your favorite bit of research you ended up not using?

Americans eat 400 million pounds of radishes a year. I have to admit, as a kid I was not pulling my weight with our national radish consumption. 

What is your favorite quote, scene, or moment from Outside Nowhere?

I have so many! But I don’t want to give too much away, so I’ll say one of my favorite scenes happens early in the story at a train station in the middle of nowhere. The station isn’t much more than an empty ticket office and a bench. Parker arrives from Pittsburgh and foolishly leaves his luggage on a train, so he only has the clothes on his back: a blue and white striped seersucker suit. It’s hot. He’s sweaty. And he hasn’t slept in two days, so he takes a nap on the bench. He’s shaken awake by Molly, the Farmer’s strong, and quick-witted niece. Parker has always been able to talk and charm his way out of everything. But Molly is smarter, faster, and funnier than Parker, and she doesn’t have patience for laziness, so before he even arrives at the farm where he’s been sent to work for the summer, Parker discovers that things are going to be harder than he thought. For the first time in his life, he’s not in control and might be in over his head. A literal wake up call to expect the unexpected.

What do you think about Outside Nowhere? Have you added it to your tbr yet? Let me know in the comments and have a splendiferous day!