Giving the Chip the Slip: The Return of the Homework Machine by Dan Gutman

POLICE CHIEF REBECCA FISH, GRAND CANYON, ARIZONA:

Is this thing workin'? Okay. Good. We're gonna need a lotta tape for this one.

Well, remember what happened the last time with those crazy kids. It was in all the papers.

Just to review, these four youngsters from the Grand Canyon School down the road built some machine that did their homework for 'em automatically. Smart kids. Good kids, down deep. And then, for some reason, they built themselves a catapult and chucked the whole darn contraption into the canyon. Strangest thing I ever seen.

Those kids from Dan Gutman's best-selling The Homework Machine are back. They're sixth graders now, made more savvy by their escapade with Brenton Damagatchi's amazing computer which spit out their homework, error-free, in warp time. And they will need all that sixth-grade savvy this time, because the homework machine, that is, its evil core, is back to haunt them.

When the kids--Sam, Judy, Kelsey, and Brenton--realized that having their work done for them was more trouble, ethically and otherwise, than it was worth, they came to the hard decision that the homework machine had to go. But being smart kids with a quirky sense of humor, they decided to get rid of it in a big way--building a medieval catapult and pitching into the Grand Canyon, conveniently nearby.

But now Brenton, the brains behind the caper, has a new worry. The seemingly indestructible main chip which powered the thing has been found still glowing on the canyon floor, and a menacing conman and a cadre of Asian gangsters are closing in on the valuable property with nefarious and threatening plans for its use. The group gets together again to try to retrieve the chip while keeping it out of the hands of evil forces, all without blowing their cover and without winding up on the canyon floor themselves.

And if the kids do get that chip back, how can they end its malevolent history for good? Well, suffice it to say that the guys' hobby of building more and more powerful model rockets comes in handy, and what's left of the homework machine gets a real out-of-this-world sendoff.

JUDY DOUGLAS, GRADE 6:

The Canyonistas were coming from all over, and another police car pulled up, and those gangsters were coming toward us, and everybody was yelling and shouting at each other. I just covered my ears.

BRENTON DAMAGATCHI, GRADE 6:

And I pushed the button.

Dan Gutman's Return of the Homework Machine, (Simon & Schuster, 2009) again narrated cleverly through Police Chief Fish's case report testimony tapes by each of the kids, is a funny and fast-paced sequel which will please fans of the first book. As usual, Gutman's writing is appealing, with snappy dialog and sympathetic characters, told with wit and with heart. As School Library Journal said of the first book, it's "...a dramatic and thought-provoking story with a strong message about honesty and friendship."

The Irregulars Rule: Kiki Strike: Inside the Shadow City by Kirsten Miller

Kirsten Miller's debut novel, Kiki Strike: Inside the Shadow City: Inside the Shadow City (Kiki Strike), is a full-blown mystery/adventure geek-chick lit thriller, a sort of literary comic book (without the comic drawings) which will have wide appeal for middle readers.

The narrator, twelve-year-old Ananka Fishbein, is a pudgy, nerdy isolated student at toney Atalanta Academy in Manhattan, who finds her only excitement in trying to avoid the taunts and bullying of the ruling clique, The Five, headed ruthlessly by the beautiful Russian doyen, "Princess" Sidonia Galatzina. But when a sinkhole in Washington Park opens up a hidden room far below ground level, Ananka is intrigued, especially when she spots a tiny, white-haired girl sneaking out of the muddy hole. Investigating the sunken room, she discovers an amazing book, Glimpses of Gotham, a guide to the New York City of 1866, with a tantalizing chapter on an underground world called "The Shadow City." Soon Ananka discovers that the tiny girl is a student at her school under the name of Kiki Strike and begins to follow her in hopes of learning more. Soon Kiki reveals herself to Ananka and invites her to join in the exploration of the underground Shadow City.

Kiki recruits a talented group of girls from assorted Girl Scout troops: Betty Bent, who is a master of disguise; Oona Wong, a sweatshop escapee who is a talented forger and hacker; Luz Lopez, electronic and mechanical genius; and DeeDee Morlock, chemist and explosives maven. Christening themselves the Baker Street Irregulars (The Irregulars for short), the girls acquire uniforms, gear, and a secret map of underground New York, part of the three-level NYCMap kept secret to prevent misuse by criminals and terrorists. Their first mission begins with a secret entry through an empty tomb. With Ananka mapping the Shadow City's chambers as they go, the Irregulars discover chambers filled the skeletons of plague victims, barrooms with bottles of a strange brew called "Devil's Apple," and the bony remains of the author of Glimpses of Gotham, extracting from his dead hands a huge bag of gold coins.

The expedition turns nearly fatal, however, when Kiki orders that DeeDee blow open a certain door despite the chamber's proximity to gas and water mains above. In the explosion, DeeDee is seriously injured and the girls are forced to flee the tunnels and abandon their quest as water from the broken mains fill the basements and streets above. Ananka is suspicious of Kiki's motives, suspecting that she has a vendetta against "Princess" Sidonia, whose house was approximately above the explosion site, and Kiki disappears from the scene for two years.

But when wannabe clique members from the Atalanta Academy begin to be kidnapped, Ananka's investigations reunite her with Kiki, who calls the Irregulars back into existence. Kiki insists that the kidnappers' motive is to gain control of the other two layers of the NYCMap as the ransom for the kidnapped girls. Sending Betty, disguised as a potential kidnappee to a secret offshore party thrown by The Five, the Irregulars track Betty and the other girls tp a secret underground chamber in the Shadow City, and in a convoluted turn of plot the Irregulars, led by the daring Kiki, unearth a criminal conspiracy controlled by the Sidonia Galatzina and her mother Olivia, whose chief goal has been to destroy Kiki, the true heir to the Pokrovian throne and wealth. While "Princess" Sidonia and her mother escape, the other members of the clique are exposed as family members of a smuggling cartel which has used the tunnels of the Shadow City.

Mystery, suspense, adventure, daring and talented girl characters, a disputed fortune, villains you love to hate, Kiki Strike: Inside the Shadow City: Inside the Shadow City (Kiki Strike) has it all for lovers of the thriller genre. Luckily for these readers, there is now a sequel, Kiki Strike: The Empress's Tomb (Kiki Strike) in which the Irregulars come together again to right the wrongs of New York City. Part of the fun of the Kiki Strike novels is in Kirsten Miller's coloring of the narrative with an obvious fondness for her Manhattan setting and her skill in portraying her characters through description and dialogue. For readers who love the exciting twists and turns of plot, these are fun books with wide appeal, and more sequels should soon be forthcoming.

Brave Hearts: Igraine the Brave by Cornelia Funke

It's almost her twelfth birthday, and Igraine of Pimpernel Castle doesn't aspire to becoming the bride of a charming prince, or even a powerful sorcerer like her parents, The Fair Melisande and Sir Lamorak the Wily. Igraine longs to be a knight in armor, astride a powerful warhorse, protecting the weak and rescuing damsels in distress.

When her birthday gift turns out to be a magic-assisted suit of weightless and waterproof armor, Igraine feels that there is no obstacle to her life's calling except possibly the teasing of her older brother Albert. But as her wizardly parents complete the spell upon her armor, a slip of the tongue turns them into pigs, just as an evil wizard Osmond and the malevolent Rowan the Heartless launch an attack upon Pimpernel Castle to satisfy his lust for the magic books which reside there. Unfortunately, Albert has failed to replenish the family's supply of red giant's hairs, leaving Melisande and Lamorak powerless to assume their wizardly shapes and powers to protect the castle and its irreplaceable library.

Donning her new armor, Igraine volunteers to take on the quest to retrieve the necessary hairs to break the spell. Leaving the student wizard Albert to defend the castle as best he can and disguising herself as a peasant farmer girl, she steals Lancelot, a white charger from the evil wizard's stable, and journeys to the far dark hills, where the giant Garleff gallantly gives up the hairs. He then warns Igraine that Osmond and Rowan are fearful opponents and takes her to meet a potential ally, the Sorrowful Knight of the Mount of Tears, who is in self-imposed exile for failing in single combat to protect three fair ladies from the evil Rowan.

The Sorrowful Knight agrees to escort her back to her castle, but finding Pimpernel already surrounded and under siege, Igraine and the Sorrowful Knight flee to a secret underground entrance to the castle. Igraine's porcine parents are thrilled to have the giant's hairs, the last ingredient for the potion which will restore them to human form, but, alas, the process requires one hour in which the castle's magical defenses will be inoperable, making all of them, not to mention their magical book collection, vulnerable to Osmond's evil powers. Bravely, despite three previous unhorsings in jousts with Rowan the Heartless, the Sorrowful Knight offers to buy time for the wizards by staging a return match with the evil knight. When Igraine learns that Rowan the Heartless wins his tourneys only through the use of a magic-imbued lance, she uses her great-great grandfather's dragon-skin cloak of invisibility to disable the cheater's lance right inside his own tent.

Realizing her wish to serve as a knight's squire, Igraine's champion, the Sorrowful Knight, bests his enemy in a fair challenge just as Lamorak and Melisande return to their full powers and defeat the evil wizard and his army. Castle Pimpernel and its library of enchantments are saved, and Igraine the Brave is on her way to full knighthood.

A whimsical adventure with a feisty and admirable young heroine makes Cornelia Funke's Igraine The Brave a sprightly read for lovers of medieval magic and chivalry. The author's delightful pen-and-ink drawings liberally adorn the text and add much to this jolly knight's tale.

Cinder-Bella: Bella At Midnight by Diane Stanley

Author Diane Stanley, noted for her earlier Rumpelstiltskin's Daughter, goes again to the well of the revisited fairy tale in her delightful revisionist Cinderella tale, Bella at Midnight.

Left motherless at birth, little Isabel is dismissed by her distant and distraught father and sent to a peasant nursemaid to be raised in the village of Castle Down. Little Bella, as she is called, grows up ignorant of her noble heritage, happy with her foster parents and big brother Will. Her best friend is the fourth-born son of the King, Prince Julian of Moranmoor, who also was wet-nursed and raised to the age of three with Bella's family. As the years pass the two children grow more fond of each other even as Julian moves on to become a page in the nearby castle of his uncle, Duke Gilbert.

But when Julian joins the other pages and young squires catcalling and flirting with pretty girls at a local fair, he is too embarrassed to greet Bella when she catches their eye, and she is heartbroken by his seeming indifference to her, believing that he is ashamed of her lowly status. Before he can explain, however, Julian is taken away as a truce hostage to the king's court in the neighboring kingdom of Brutanna. Bella, too, is suddenly taken from what she believes to be her family and reintroduced to her father's household, to his difficult new wife and her two new stepsisters. Stepsister Alice is still deep in silent grief for her merchant father, lost at sea, and stepsister Marianne is a pretty, social-climbing opportunist who wrangles a place as lady-in-waiting to the queen and finds peasant-raised Bella smelly and unworthy of notice. Berated and shunned in her father's lavish house, Bella sleeps in the kitchen by the fire and turns to the cook for affection.

But when Marianne's gossipy tale of the queen's squabble with her husband reveals that the king plans to launch a secret attack upon Brutanna which will endanger Julian's life, Bella travels to the Brutannian court. There, disguised as a fine lady in a white brocade dress and glass slippers, she attends a wedding feast and meets secretly with Prince Julian long enough to share the attack plan with him. Seeking to avert the battle and the renewal of the 100-year war between Moranmoor and Brutanna, Julian slips out of the castle and meets with the king of Moranmoor, who rejects his plea and draws his army into formation for combat.

Knowing that Julian will die if the battle begins, Bella settles upon a desperate plan. Disguising herself as the Worthy Knight, the prophesied peacemaker from God who comes to end the long war, by the light of the full moon she rides between the battle lines with a white banner of peace fashioned from her borrowed gown, and her ruse ends the battle before it begins.

That this Cinderella who rescues her prince also marries him is a foregone conclusion. Knighted Sir Isabel by Prince Julian, Isabel becomes his wife in the village church and everyone surely lives happily ever after. A bit of romance, a touch of magic, plenty of adventure, and a strong theme of loyalty, honesty, and honor make Bella at Midnight a novel that has something old and something new, something borrowed and something true to that royal wedding at its conclusion.

Bella at Midnight has appeared on the state children's choice award lists of Georgia, Texas, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, and is a 2008-2009 Tennessee State Book Award nominee for Grades 4-6.

Adventure Stories for Girls: Whisper in the Dark by Joseph Bruchac

Joseph Bruchac, author of the Native American-rooted thriller Skeleton Man has written another story in which a frightening Indian legend appears in a terrorizing modern manifestation.

Maddy always loved the spooky stories her Gramma Delia told, tales from their Narragansett ancestors of ghosts and monsters. When she gets a scary phone call which ends in a whispered "I'm coming for you," her thoughts first turn to the Whisperer, the twisted shaman whose hands turn to iron claws, whose victims hear him whispering until at last he speaks their names and takes them to their deaths in his dark cave.

Maddy finds it possible to dismiss this call as a prank as she tells her friend Roger about it, but when the message "I am here," is scratched on the door and her Aunt Lyssa's dog is found with four claw-like slashes on her back, Maddy and Roger begin to take her fears seriously. When Lyssa disappears and Maddy's search for her leads them through a locked door in the cellar, the old story of the Narragansett Whisperer seems all too real.

Bruchac has a wonderful of way of letting the supernatural break through into the real world that keeps the reader flying through these short, taut novels. Frightened but never victims, his resilient characters resolutely manage their fears and overcome the evil doers which, in their minds at least, assume the shape of primeval Indian demons.

Adventure for Girls: Skeleton Man by Joseph Bruchac

Joseph Bruchac's Skeleton Man is a classic suspense thriller melded with a monster tale drawn from Native American legend. The novel begins in media res with middle-schooler Molly narrating how she came to be held prisoner each night by a skeletal old man claiming to be her great uncle.

When Molly's parents fail to return home after a Saturday evening out, Molly is initially in a state of denial, hiding their disappearance from her school and her parents' employers and praying that they will return. When the truth becomes evident, Molly is horrified when the authorities hand her over to tall, scary man of whom she had never heard but who presents credentials and old family photos as proof of kinship to local social workers.

As she is taken away by the strange man, Molly cannot help thinking of her mother's retelling of an old Mohawk story of a lazy greedy uncle who first ate his own flesh from his bones and then one by one consumes his family. When the old man's bizarre behavior and nightly trip upstairs to lock Molly into her bedroom begins to terrify her, Molly falls back on her family's teachings of courage and begins to plan her escape.

Snooping while her so-called uncle is away, Molly discovers surveillance monitoring on his computer and realizes that the outside doors and perhaps her own room have cameras planted in them. Carefully, praying that her frightening dreams will guide her, Molly plans her escape. On Friday, when computer installers leave their tool kits in her classroom, Molly takes a drill home with her, and when she knows her "uncle" is paying his nightly visit to his tool shed outside, she removes the hinges from her door to escape. Quickly collecting computer disks and printed evidence from his office, Molly slips out of the house into the moonlit night.

Once concealed outside, Molly throws a stone through her bedroom window to lure the "uncle" inside and rushes into the shed, where she quickly locates an underground cage where her parents are held captive. Passing the tools to her father to help them escape, Molly flees through the woods toward the river with the old man not far behind.

As in her dreams, a rabbit breaks out of the underbrush and seems to lead her toward a rickety footbridge across the river rapids. As Skeleton Man draws closer and closer, Molly's only hope is to follow the "spirit guide" represented by the rabbit and the daring plan revealed by her dream.

Bruchac combines the horror of a supernatural stalker with details of modern technology in a riveting fantasy horror tale and a modern crime story believable on both levels. A resourceful heroine who refuses to become a victim, Molly is an appealing and plausible character as Bruchac ably weaves her Native American background seamlessly into a page-turning thriller. As R. L. Stine (best known for his best-selling Goosebumps series) wrote of this novel, "The legend is chilling--and the terror builds on every page. This book gave ME nightmares!"

Molly's story is continued in Bruchac's 2006 sequel The Return of Skeleton Man. Taken together, these two middle-school mystery-fantasies are great for readalouds, sleepovers, campouts, and just plain flashlight reading under the covers!