Onion John

Twelve year old Andy Rusch is one of the only people in the small New Jersey town of Serenity who can actually understand Onion John, an eccentric immigrant handyman who lives alone at the edge of town in a stone hut furnished with old bathtubs and speaks in a heavily accented, garbled English nobody else bothers to decode. Onion John believes in his own private folk cosmology, friendly spirits living in the clouds, evil ones to be driven off with smoke, and the town tolerates and half mocks him, paying him in odd jobs and cast off clothing while treating him more as a curiosity than a neighbor. Andy's father, eager to do something civic minded and convinced he is helping, persuades the local Rotary Club to build Onion John a proper modern house complete with electricity and running water, a well meant project that leaves Onion John visibly uncomfortable rather than grateful, since it strips away the life he actually chose for himself. The new house catches fire after Onion John accidentally leaves newspaper too close to the stove, and rather than accept the town's offer to simply rebuild it, he packs up and leaves Serenity entirely, unwilling to be remade for anyone's comfort but his own. The book ends with Andy seriously weighing whether to follow him, caught between the friendship he has valued all along and the life his father expects him to lead instead.

Underneath its odd, comic surface it is really a book about a father and son working out how much of a life gets decided for you by other people's good intentions, more argument than adventure.