Here’s a moving story in verse that includes mountains, blisters, many varieties of chocolate-chip cookies, and finding the space for the main character to reevaluate and come to terms with his deceased first responder father as the pure hero that other people see him as and the more complicated person he was in real life. I picked up this review copy because I’d really enjoyed the author’s The Seventh Wish, and I was glad I did.

The Trouble with Heroes
by Kate Messner

Bloomsbury, 2025

ISBN 9781547616398

Review copy kindly provided by the publisher.

You wouldn’t know it from the cover, but Finn does not like hiking or dogs. He is, though, in a bit of a pickle. The year is 2022, and he’s been having trouble with his temper since his first responder father died away from him and his mother in New York City. Everyone wants to tell him that his father was a hero, but Finn would really rather his father had stayed home. Meanwhile, he’s failing a couple of classes due to incomplete work, and the story opens with a newspaper article about a local kid (him) kicking over the gravestone of a beloved local hiker and Adirondack 46ers corresponing secretary. The daughter of the deceased requests that he hike all 46 of the Adirondack peaks over the summer as repayment, because she thinks that Finn needs help more than punishment and her mother believed in the power of the mountains to heal. Furthermore, he needs to bring her mother’s dog with him, as she’d been trying to rehike them all with the dog when she died.

Finn is not happy about this, but his mother assures him that he doesn’t have a choice. The story is written as the poetry journal project he failed to turn in before the end of the school year, and the early poems are about as good as you’d expect from a cranky and uncooperative middle schooler. The hikes are hard, the backpack is too heavy for him, the dog is too slobbery, and he’s determined not to respond to the overly friendly guides (mostly retirees) who’ve volunteered to help him. Slowly, slowly, he reflects on his complicated relationship with his father, a father he loved but who was rarely home and was unhappy with Finn’s too-feminine love of baking when he was home. Slowly, his strength grows, he develops cookie recipes to match each day’s hike, his poetry improves, and he is able to let go of his pain enough to learn more about his father. This also allows his relationship with his mother and grandmother to grow. And while I love all these aspects, there are enough falls in the mud, rainstorms, close calls, and goofy dog antics to make this a very entertaining book to read, along with the occasional tears.