Tommy Lomax’s school, McQuarrie Middle School, is where most of the story takes place. The campus is based on the middle school that Angleberger attended near the foothills of northern Virginia. Angleberger named his fictional school in honor of Ralph McQuarrie, an Oscar-winning designer whose drawings of scenes and characters in Star Wars helped make that film one of the most-popular movies of all time.

The school shares the typical characteristics of most public middle schools with their assembly halls, monthly dances, rule-bound administrations and teachers who struggle to control eccentric, maverick students. Overall, it’s a pleasant, if blandly typical, place to learn, and its teachers are generally fair-minded and good at their jobs. The conventionality of the school foils Dwight Tharp, who is as eccentric as the school is typical.

Dwight learns origami, the art of folding paper into objects like birds or flowers, and uses it to create Origami Yoda, a hand puppet that dispenses wisdom to students. Dwight voices the puppet badly, but his advice is excellent, and Origami Yoda’s reputation grows quickly. Though it’s the titular character, and though Dwight encourages other kids to think of it as a real, sentient being connected to the Force from Star Wars, it is in fact simply a small artwork made of folded paper.