Roy Blakeley, Pathfinder

This is boys'-adventure fiction at its most irrepressibly cheerful. Roy Blakeley is seventeen going on infinite, and when he announces he'll hike from Catskill, New York to Bridgeboro, New Jersey with his pals, you can almost hear the footsteps racing ahead of the narrative. The story crackles with practical jokes, heated debates about the proper way to pack a knapsack, and the particular logic of boys arguing about nothing and everything with equal passion. What follows is a grand tramp through wilderness and countryside, where the real treasure isn't some hidden cache but the banter itself, the shared exhaustion, and the small victories of friendship tested on the open road. Fitzhugh understands that the best adventures are the ones where nothing particularly needs to happen, where the journey is the destination and the company is everything.