Amazon.com description: Product Description: By the bestselling author of "Escaping the Holocaust" Julian Padowicz from Scholastic Books http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/book/escaping-holocaust From his miserable childhood to his mediocre career as a college professor, fate had not been kind, or even terribly fair, to "Kip" Kippur. But Kip's luck changes when he inherits a house in a small coastal village in Massachusetts. He chucks his previous life and moves there to write the Great American Novel a thinly disguised autobiography. As Kip struggles to transmute a leaden life into golden fiction, he finds himself alone and rudderless in a strange community. He stumbles into a mysterious murder, an awkward romance, a married lady's hot-tub, an unusual proposal of marriage and an invitation to sail to Florida, during storm season, in a sailboat of questionable seaworthiness, with an autocratic captain and a homicidal crew mate. But Writer's Block is more than just the tale of a late-life crisis gone terribly awry. It's also an intriguing portrait of a small town and the complex people who inhabit it. It will keep you riveted all the way to its crashing conclusion.