On a dark winter morning, nine-year-old Petey Myshkin Stephenson is taken by a mysterious, battered yellow trolley he has never seen before to a place called "Otherwise." There he discovers a place in the middle of summer, with a green sky, where birds fly upside down and the sun rises in the west. It is also in the midst of a war. The trolley picks up a young girl named Sharlotta, who has just escaped a battle where her family was abducted by...