I must have bought this young reader book at a school bookfair many years ago. I don’t know what attracted me to it – maybe the cover illustration? I can’t imagine that this one was a gift from my book-gifting grandmother: not her cup of tea, at all.

In this book, Ozzie – an unrepentant practical joker – is having a really bad day. A really, really bad day.

There he was, playing a board game he really loved, when his best friend goes and gets mad because Ozzie made a stupid joke at his friend’s expense, and now his friend doesn’t want to play anymore. Ozzie’s mom is mad because Ozzie was late coming home from school – he only meant to play one game but the game was so good that he played three rounds – and she bawls him out because his teacher didn’t appreciate the limerick he made up about her (no sense of humor) – and then he couldn’t get his mom to laugh either. And she deferred his punishment until his dad gets home which doesn’t just mean a spanking but also banishment to a military academy, where they surely won’t appreciate Ozzie’s persistent sense of humor.

And then Ozzie decides to run away from home and the trellis under his bedroom window collapses.

Ozzie wakes up somewhere else entirely. Somewhere like being inside a giant board game, just the kind he likes. There are challenges that move you forward, like making up a spoonerism about someone. You can take actions that move you backwards, like joking in a no-joking zone.

Ozzie is accompanied on this journey by a guy who says he’s Ozzie’s guardian devil, and has the horns and forked tail to prove it. He explains the rules as Ozzie moves through the game and tries to steer him right. But as the the game goes on, it becomes literally life and death, as Ozzie’s fast mouth puts him in peril of staying in the Big Joke Game forever and giving up his mortal life.

This has remained one of my favorite books all these years because it is so clever. The game is designed to draw you in and the challenges to make you laugh. And, in the end, Ozzie has to learn to curb his impulse to turn everything into a joke.

This is a hard book to get ahold of: I paid less than $1.00 for it and, the going rate online now is $45.00 (or more, for hardcover) – although my copy would certainly not be worth that much as it is not in pristine condition. In fact, it looks like it met a family of beavers somewhere along the lines. Or perhaps they were gerbils. I did have gerbils growing up and every single one escaped the cage – although why they’d want to do that in a family with four cats, I don’t know – and, when we carried my bookshelf out to the moving van, we found an empty gerbil’s nest behind it. So it’s possible…

I never had a smart mouth like Ozzie – I can only think of two times when I had the perfect comeback to someone just when I needed it, and those both occurred when I was much older* – but I also love board games. And I admire people with that quick wit. And I was so quiet that I became the target of many a smart mouth in school.

But there’s a bigger lesson in this book that I took away. That decisions and habits have consequences. Yeah, maybe I didn’t mouth off at my teachers. But I did feed my own darkness in how I chose to interact with people and by not setting boundaries. Not walking away when someone was picking on me. Giving the satisfaction of seeing how flustered or angry they made me. There’s nothing wrong with glancing down at your phone as if it has silently rung, and saying, “Oh, I’ve got to take this…” and leaving the room to calm down. Or saying, “Oh, I’m so sorry, I want to continue this conversation but I’ve just got to run!” and exiting stage left.

That’s what I think I took away from this book: we often create our own hells, our own limbos.

And we’re the only ones who can rescue us from them.

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^{*This happens when you get older. Stay with us, kids, it gets better.}