All his life Joe Lang was to remember that night – the night that tossed him into a new world.

It started out exactly as usual; he ate his dinner in the cook-tent with Mo Shapely the clown, and Dad and Etta. Then he and Mo walked over to the wagon they shared to dress for the evening performance. All around them were the sounds and smells of the circus – the chant of the guying-out crews, the rattle of cage doors, the stench of the animal tent, the sharp pungence of sawdust, and the shrill cries of a group of small boys enjoying a free-for-all in the dust behind the ringmaster’s wagon. They were sounds and smells that were as much a part of life to Joe as the air he breathed, for he had never been away from them in all his fifteen years.

Read the opening chapter of Sawdust in His Shoes, a classic middle-grade novel by three-time Newbery Honor Book author Eloise Jarvis McGraw.