Christopher McIntyre, Kit to his friends, is a quite ordinary seventeen-year-old boy, enjoying the long days of summer, until a visit to his friend—the eccentric writer Philip Amirault—changes his life forever.

All it took was a pair of glasses.

Looking through them opened a gateway into a parallel world, one almost—but not exactly—like the one he left. Transported from his suburban apartment home in the Pacific Northwest to Finn Hill, a village in the forested hills of upstate New York, Kit finds himself immersed in a world that is coming apart a piece at a time. Somehow, his leap through space has brought something else along, something that is threatening to tear apart the fabric of reality.

Together with the charming Malachi Swenson, a boy from the parallel world, Kit has got to repair the damage he inadvertently did, and save as many of the people from Finn Hill as he can. And, along the way, find a way not to lose his blossoming relationship with Malachi—something that is finally giving some color to his previously bland life.