Mail Travel 📩

Summary

In this strange world, people travel by mailing themselves: they climb into a box, put a stamp on their head, and hope the post office can read the destination. Neat handwriting is a matter of life and death. A cousin’s attempt to write “Ohio” sends him to Antarctica, while Grandma’s trip to Hawaii takes three weeks and leaves her covered in stickers.

When a storm washes the address off the narrator’s father’s box, he is declared lost in a vast warehouse where misaddressed people and parcels disappear forever. The narrator, a three-time cursive champion, refuses to give up. He mails himself to the lost-mail office and finds his father. Realizing that the other lost travelers have no return addresses, he spends two days writing down everyone’s home address and marking each box “return to sender.”

At last, the warehouse doors open, sending a million boxes flying home. The narrator and his father land on their own porch. Afterward, all the kids at school want calligraphy lessons.

Personalities Mentioned

• The narrator
• His father, Tommy
• His mother
• The postman
• The narrator’s cousin
• Grandma
• The other lost travelers