Reminiscent of Oscar and Lucinda, this is the story of an imaginative child raised in the intolerant atmosphere of New Zealand's Christian Brethren. Elsdon Bird is an affectionate and imaginative child raised in a family steeped in the religious intolerance of the Christian Brethren sect. When his father is fired from his city workplace for proselytizing and trying to "save" his coworkers, the Birds are forced to leave Wellington and their odd-ball neighbors with whom the lonely, marginalized boy had some affinity, and move to a small, remote town in the north. Here, life might have changed for the better, but instead the family begins to disintegrate. Socially isolated beyond regular infusions of bigotry from the other Brethren families or "holy rollers" in the town, his parents descend further into a rigid looking-glass world of religious fundamentalism that uses Elsdon as a whipping boy for all its frustrations. Driven more and more into himself and inspired by The Jungle Book, Elsdon builds a fragile internal world maintained by conversations with cows and sheep. He also talks to a small voice in his head which, for a time, is the closest thing he has to a confidant. Yet, when a sequence of disasters finally breaks up the family, the endearing Elsdon's amazing resilience and precocious humanity see him win through in the end.