First–year teacher and capital ‘R’ romantic Lucy Hewitt is a friend of nature. She calls to sunlight, trees, and rivers, and they respond. Lucy plans to use this ability to inspire the downbeat students in the Valley of Dolores.

But Dolores Hall, the valley’s school, has no room for books, beauty, or wonder, thanks to the school’s new curriculum, which consists of puzzles. Black and gray metal puzzles. Now the classes will assemble, disassemble, and reassemble the puzzles endlessly, in preparation for Measurement Day, when the students will be thrust into a machine to have their brain capacities measured.

Lucy says no. She has her students use the puzzle pieces to build lanterns and she stuffs them with sunlight. She has them build fountains and bird houses and bridges—anything that will awaken their imaginations. The Dolores Hall administrators grow increasingly skeptical of Lucy. Will her idealism threaten the loss of her teacherhood or plant seeds of revolution and renewal in Dolores? Will she teach the way that she set out to teach or snuff out the flame of her students’ sense of wonder?

Lucy Teaches in Dolores is a book about how humans are more like trees than computers, how inspiration can’t be measured, and how we aren’t human beings, but human becomings.