All-Day Breakfast: A Novel

When widowed father and substitute teacher Peter Giller leads an eleventh-grade class on a field trip to a plastics factory, he thinks the worst that could happen is that the parent volunteers won’t show up (they don’t), the kids will be rude (they are) or the free lunch will be terrible (it is).

A leaking pipe sprays Peter and the students with a mysterious pink goo and “the worst that could happen” spikes from inconvenient to catastrophic. At first, the goo’s strange side effects are mild:...