When it comes to Maniac Magee, it’s hard to separate truth from myth. To this day, many stories circulate about him around the town of Two Mills, Pennsylvania. What we know for sure is that he was born in the neighboring town of Bridgeport, to an ordinary mother and father, and that he was originally called Jeffrey, not Maniac. But he was suddenly orphaned at three years old, when his parents were killed in a trolley crash.
Little Jeffrey goes to live with his Aunt Dot and Uncle Dan in another town. However, his life with them is miserable because his aunt and uncle hate one another and won’t speak. One spring, when Jeffrey is around 10, he sees Dot and Dan sitting on opposite sides of the auditorium during the school musical. He snaps, starts screaming, and runs away, never to return to school.
Somehow—nobody is quite sure how or why—Jeffrey settles in Two Mills a year later. The first person he meets is a girl named Amanda Beale. Jeffrey thinks she’s a runaway because she’s carrying a suitcase. But the suitcase is filled with Amanda’s personal library—she’s hiding it from her messy younger siblings. Amanda is puzzled by this suspiciously friendly white kid showing up in Two Mills’ East End (white people normally stick to the West End), but she’s a friendly girl herself, so she agrees to lend the awestruck Jeffrey one of her prized books.
That first day, Jeffrey makes several more appearances around Two Mills. He catches a high school varsity player’s football pass one-handed. He rescues a terrified kid from the backyard of Finsterwald, a neighbor everyone fears. He hits multiple homeruns against bullying pitcher Giant John McNab—even when McNab tosses a frog instead of a ball. Not long after, the kids of Two Mills start calling Jeffrey “Maniac Magee.”
One day, McNab and his gang, the Cobras, chase Maniac into the East End in revenge. Maniac is confronted by a famously tough kid named Mars Bar Thompson, who tries to intimidate Maniac, calling him “fishbelly” and ripping a page out of Amanda’s book. Eventually, the two run into Amanda, who yells at Mars Bar and invites Maniac home with her. Maniac has a great time playing with Amanda’s younger siblings, Hester and Lester, and eating dinner with the family. When it comes out that Maniac is homeless, the Beales immediately welcome him to stay.
Maniac quickly feels at home with his new “family.” He loves tiring out the little kids, untying their shoelace knots, and even helping with household chores. He spends the summer playing football and other games with East End kids at the vacant lot, and he wakes up early in the morning to borrow Amanda’s books. He doesn’t think of the East Enders as “black” or himself as “white.”
One day, however, an old man jeers Maniac as “Whitey” during a neighborhood party. The incident unsettles him, and a few days later, somebody scrawls “Fishbelly go home” on the Beales’ house. Maniac almost runs away again, but Amanda comes up with a plan to persuade him to stay and to get the entire town on Maniac’s side. If he successfully unties famous Cobble’s Knot—a huge knot of rope made legendary by a corner pizza joint—everybody will think he’s a hero. He agrees to try. It takes Maniac all day, but he successfully unravels Cobble’s Knot, unleashing a town-wide celebration. During the festivities, however, Amanda notices that the confetti flying through the air is actually made from the pages of one of her beloved books. Maniac feels to blame for exposing the Beales to others’ mockery, and he walks straight out of Two Mills.
Maniac starts sleeping in the buffalo pen at the Elmwood Park Zoo. He becomes ragged and frail. One day, he’s discovered by an elderly parkhand, Grayson. Grayson gets food and clothes for Maniac and gives him shelter in the baseball equipment room of the park’s band shell. Gradually, Maniac gets Grayson to open up to him about his youthful dreams of becoming a Major League baseball player. He finds out that Grayson pitched in the Minor Leagues for years, then had his dreams crushed after pitching a lousy game in front of a talent scout. Since leaving baseball, he’s only worked dead-end jobs.
One day, Maniac discovers that Grayson doesn’t know how to read. They buy picture books and a chalkboard, and Maniac gets to work tutoring Grayson. Within a few weeks, Grayson reads The Little Engine That Could without help. While he can never fulfill his baseball dreams, Grayson feels pride in himself for the first time in many years. He and Maniac celebrate a joyful Thanksgiving and Christmas together, and Maniac feels like he’s finally home. But a few days after Christmas, Grayson dies quietly of old age. Maniac, devastated at being orphaned once again, runs away.
Maniac wanders for a while, homeless, and finally settles into a replica cabin in the Valley Forge historic park, expecting to freeze or starve to death. But a couple days later, two little boys, Piper and Russell, interrupt his sleep. The boys are attempting to run away to Mexico. Maniac coaxes them home to Two Mills by promising to show them a shortcut to Mexico. But when they reach town, Maniac discovers that the boys are Giant John McNab’s little brothers. After Maniac helps Giant John save face by claiming he’d thrown a pitch that Maniac couldn’t hit, John lets him stay at the McNabs’.
Maniac quickly discovers that the McNab home is filled with trash and neglect. Their father, George, is often drunk, rarely home, and full of paranoid theories about a coming invasion by “the enemy”—the people of the East End. But Maniac stays, feeling compelled to help Piper and Russell by bribing them with pizza and “heroic” feats in exchange for the boys going to school. Their determination to run away reminds him of himself. The boys also remind him of Hester and Lester Beale—but unlike the Beale home, the McNabs’ environment is toxic.
Maniac goads Mars Bar Thompson into attending Piper’s birthday party, realizing that racial hostility stems partly from ignorance of one another’s lives. The meeting ends badly, with Mars Bar angrily returning home to the East End and Maniac leaving the McNabs’ for good. However, Maniac and Mars Bar start running into each other during their early morning runs around town, and they wordlessly begin running together. One day, the two come across a crying Piper McNab, telling them that Russell is stuck on the trolley trestle, too scared to move. Maniac, remembering his parents’ deaths in the trolley crash, silently walks away, leaving Mars Bar to save the day.
A couple days later, Mars Bar tracks down Maniac, who’s retreated to the buffalo pen at the zoo. Maniac tells Mars Bar the story of his parents’ deaths. Mars Bar invites Maniac to stay at his house, and when Maniac declines, Mars Bar gets Amanda, who climbs into the buffalo pen and rants at him until Maniac, laughing for the first time in ages, agrees to leave with her. Listening to Amanda grumble, he realizes that he’s finally being called home.
