The seventh graders and their Star Wars-inspired Origami finger puppets go on a field trip to Washington, D.C., on what proves to be a very long trip full of shifting alliances, betrayals, carsickness, and sugar rushes.

"When she learns that her mother is sick in Ohio, Mim confronts her demons on a thousand-mile odyssey from Mississippi that redefines her notions of love, loyalty, and what it means to be sane"--

1964, Ken Kesey, the famed author of 'One flew over the cuckoo's nest, ' set off on a legendary cross-country road trip to the New York World's Fair, joined by 'The Merry Band of Pranksters, ' a renegade group of counterculture truth-seekers, including Neal Cassady, the American icon immortalized in Kerouac's 'On the Road, ' and the driver and painter of the psychedelic Magic Bus.