Sawyer Lee and the Quest to Just Stay Home

By Zach Weinersmith

From New York Times-bestselling and Hugo Award-winning author Zach Weinersmith comes a cartoon-illustrated middle grade novel starring a ferociously inactive kid who is dragged against his will into the madcap adventures of his friends and family.

Eleven-year-old Sawyer Lee descends from an endless lineage of absolute go-getters: astronauts, scientists, champion athletes, spies, and other assorted people of action. To this heritage, he says "thanks, but no." His life's goal, if we must use that word, is to spend his days on his best friend Gary's couch, with roughly the ambition of a barnacle with the flu.

The problem is that Sawyer lives in the town of Ovelaville, where everybody (including his aunt Celia and other best friend Angela) is obsessed with doing whatever it takes to win the grand prize at the annual gourd festival, celebrating nature's dullest vegetable. As their schemes for total gourd domination grow, Sawyer is, to his horror, caught up in both an adventure and a mystery. And he knows it will take a regrettable amount of energy either to get to the bottom of things or convince everyone to give up on it, and find the way back to his happy place on Gary's couch, with a cozy throw blanket, a steaming mug of chamomile tea, and an empty schedule.

In this tale of friendship, love, betrayal, madness, and gardening enthusiasm, acclaimed cartoonist Zach Weinersmith introduces a hero who, as a general matter, would rather not. In that spirit, he has reduced the total number of words by providing over a hundred hilarious cartoons.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374393494
• ISBN13: 9780374393496
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Byr)
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.4" x 8.3"
• Age Range: 8 to 12 years
• Grade Range: Grades 3 to 7