When we last left Nate Foster, we didn’t want to.

Tens of thousands who read Tim Federle’s young adult novel Better Nate Than Ever immediately fell in love with the thirteen-year-old native of Jankburg, Pennsylvania.

Where?

Put it this way: it’s so woeful a town that the one in Anyone Can Whistle seems positively prosperous and utopian in comparison.

In Better Nate Than Ever, Nate’s intense wish to perform in that greatest of entertainments known as The Broadway Musical gives him the courage that we all wish we’d had: he gets on a bus, travels umpteen hours to New York and auditions for E.T.: The Musical without telling anyone in his family where he’s going or what he’s doing.

Federle didn’t tell us if Nate had been cast, but now his Five, Six, Seven, Nate! -- a book that’s equally as splendid as his first – allows us all to breathe a sigh of relief: Nate indeed made the cut. So he’ll live with his aunt in a city of eight million, as opposed to Jankburg which has, he tells us, “fewer than eight thousand people – and that includes the cemeteries.”

Smart kid, this Nate. And yet we revel in his naiveté, too: “Maybe today is a national day of mourning in New York,” he notes on the first day of rehearsal. “Everyone is all in black. Or maybe it’s traditional to do that in honor of all the folks who didn’t get hired.”

And while at that moment Nate is higher than that old devil moon, he’ll soon crash to earth with the force of the Giant’s Wife in Into The Woods. The bloom is off his rosy cheeks when he finds that the other cast members his age – or younger – are already seasoned vets of Broadway shows. They’ve got the fabulous resumes, the gorgeous headshots, the backstage stories while all Nate has to offer is – well, Nate. He feels about as tall as a speck of stage dust, and that he’s been merely cast as “Alien Seven” doesn’t help, for he knows that it “could be anyone” in the role. What’s particularly galling is that Jordan Rylance, his arch-enemy from back home, has the lead. “Jordan refuses to make eye contact with me even once,” he mourns.

Five, Six, Seven, Nate! also tells about the anguish in readying a great big Broadway show. Observes the assistant choreographer, “It’s like the Holland Tunnel at rush hour during a presidential visit.” And E.T.: The Musical has more problems than most. Federle slyly comments on who gets hired today: the director has never done a musical, but he’s had great success with video games. He in turn hires an assistant who was “recently named Motion-Capture Actor of the Decade.” Says Nate, “He’s somewhat of a celebrity among normal boys my age.”

There’s the rub that rubs me the wrong way: kids interested in theater and not in the latest stupidity have been programmed to see themselves as not normal but markedly inferior. Federle vanquishes this by creating a terrific kid, yes, but he also provides enough humor that we see that Nate’s wit, incisiveness and sensitivity should be the new normal.

All right, maybe the kid is a little flamboyant. In one howlingly funny line, Nate recalls the look that Anthony, his older brother, gave him “the first time I got on the school bus wearing turquoise – and I don’t mean the color.” Their relationship is so strained that when Nate gets himself into some white-hot water with the director, he envisions a Jankburg newspaper headline proclaiming “Local Boy Makes Bad. Comes Home to Town Square Hanging. Older Brother Thrilled.”

Anthony is a chip off the old blockhead that is Nate’s father. And yet, ho-ho-ho, who’s got the last laugh now? At the moment, Nate is actually making more per week than his not-so-dear old dad. Such a situation helps him rebound from that first disappointing day. “This is the only important thing happening on earth,” Nate insists. “You haven’t lived till you’ve walked through a stage door.” He cherishes his laminated all-access badge on a silver chain. (“I used to wear a silver cross,” he notes, “but this is more like my true religion.”) Nate loves flashing it to the security guard “every time,” even after the man has come to know him.

And while the action centers in New York, Nate still does plenty of corresponding with his best Jankburg friend Libby. We love him for not feeling that he’s “outgrown” her, as so many people who need to grow up themselves have felt about old friends in their home towns.

On the other hand, who could give up a honeybunch like Libby? Wouldn’t we all like as our best friend someone who, when she wants to sarcastically express that something is self-evident, doesn’t got for the all-too-obvious “Is the Pope Catholic?” but instead creatively says, “Should Karen Morrow have won a Tony for I Had a Ball?”

That brings us to the book’s other significant component. It’s one that may well be denounced from pulpits across the land and could even lead to a book-burning in front of libraries in a few small towns. Yet many others will loudly applaud Federle’s completely courageous way of dealing with Nate’s sexuality.

In the first book, Nate matter-of-factly stated that he was “undecided” as to whether he’d spend a life dating and mating males or females. As it turns out, Federle was gingerly introducing the issue that he and Nate would squarely decide in the second book. What happens to Nate – and it IS what happens to him, for he’s not the aggressor here – is what is happening all over this country – or should be. There are literally millions of boys Nate’s age who have the same feelings and questions that he does; when they read page 264, they’ll be swept away in happiness for him and be given a good deal of hope for their own futures.

Last week, at the Junior Theater Festival in Atlanta, Federle was treated and greeted by thousands of kids who regarded him as a Broadway star (which, I insist, is several notches above the usual term used for a much-admired person: rock-star).

And what, you may ask, is the Junior Theater Festival? Ah, that’s next week’s column … and the column after that … and the column after that. In the meantime, while you’re waiting, whether you’re a junior, senior or something in between, you can’t pass the time any better than by reading and savoring Five, Six, Seven, Nate!

You may e-mail Peter at pfilichia@aol.com. Check out his weekly column each Tuesday at www.masterworksbroadway.com and each Friday at www.kritzerland.com. His new book, Strippers, Showgirls, and Sharks – a Very Opinionated History of the Broadway Musicals That Did Not Win the Tony Award is now available at www.amazon.com.