Crispin at the Edge of the World

Crispin: At the Edge of the World appeared in 2006 as the second book of Avi's trilogy about a medieval peasant boy, taking up the story where the Newbery Medal winner that preceded it stopped. Its narrator is thirteen years old and living in fourteenth-century England, free for the first time in his life, and his companion Bear is a juggler and former spy who has become something like a father to him.

Freedom does not last long. Bear's old associates from the Peasants' Revolt want him dead, and an arrow in the back leaves him too weak to travel, so the pair are taken in by a midwife-healer in the woods and by a girl called Troth, whose cleft lip has made her an outcast in her own village. When soldiers kill the old woman, the two boys and the girl are on their own again, with Bear as their guardian.

Avi's medieval England is a place where birth decides almost everything and where the church offers both refuge and danger, and the novel keeps its three travellers inside that world rather than above it. This is the middle of a trilogy, so the journey it describes is one stage of a longer arc, and it leaves the group at the edge of the world they know.