Ambrose Bukowski is a twelve-year-old with a talent for mismatching his clothes for saying the wrong thing at the worst possible time & for words In short he's a self-described nerd Making friends is especially hard because he & his overprotective mother Irene have had to move so often & when bullies at his latest school almost kill him by deliberately slipping a peanut into his sandwich to set off his allergy it's his mother who has the extreme reaction From now on Ambrose has to be home-schooled Then Ambrose strikes up an unlikely friendship with the landlord's son Cosmo an ex-con who's been in prison They have nothing in common except for Scrabble But a small deception grows out of control when Ambrose convinces a reluctant Cosmo to take him to a Scrabble club Could this spell disaster for Ambrose?