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By Sean Clark, on August 13th, 2010 [Find previous installments of JABBIC here. You can suggest covers we should use by emailing us here.]
 Four of our contributors guessed the premise of Pittacus Lore’s I Am Number Four with only this cover image available to them. Now it’s up to you: which paragraph below is based on the real novel? The answer, and who wrote which fakery, will be posted in the comments later today.
1.) Six unnamed teens awaken to an underground lab with no memory of their capture. Directed by the whims of IamSeven, the robotic voice emanating from a circular screen, they must work together to escape or face destruction. One of the unlucky prisoners vanishes every day, and Number Four’s time is running short.
2.) In a world where food is a scarce necessity and starvation is commonplace, an Odinic vegetarian wanderer named Burt must make an impossible decision. With his 3 companions dead by their own hands and the ruling families’ lead bounty hunter on his trail, Burt is deathly afraid and immeasurably ravenous. Given the choice between a fate worse than death and feasting on the bodies of his seemingly delicious comrades, Burt must think fast or die. An amazingly deep first novel by first time writer Pittacus Lore, I Am Number Four probes the depths of the human psyche and asks the question, “Are we what we eat?”
3.) The aliens came from the sun. Four of them, but only one survived the trip. When a young teen finds and nurses to health the solar traveller, he thinks he has found a friend from out of this world. Soon he learns the being he’s nursed back to health wants only one thing: to facilitate the enslavement of the human race.
4.) A string of bizarre occurrences has left a small Kansas town confused and scared. Crop circles and livestock mutilations are one thing, but soon citizens, all children, begin to disappear. Marissa is the fourth child to vanish from her bed in the middle of the night. She wakes up on a seemingly abandoned alien spaceship, with a glowing symbol emanating from her chest, the other stolen children lay dead around her, branded with the same symbol. Stranded alone in space, Marissa determines to find a way home.
5.) John has just arrived in Paradise, Ohio, just another stop in a string of small towns where the 15-year-old has been hiding out from terrifying aliens who are hellbent on destroying him and eight other special children. The evil aliens are picking off the surviving kids in numerical order. The first three are dead and John’s number is up. Will he develop super powers in time for him to fight against the enemy? The battle for Earth is on and there’s a new kid in town!
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By Nico Vreeland, on August 6th, 2010 [Find previous installments of JABBIC here. You can suggest covers we should use, or volunteer to write a blurb, by emailing us here.]
 JABBIC is kind of like Balderdash with book covers. Based only on the cover at right (slightly ‘shopped this week to obscure hinting blurbs), four of our contributors made up a one-paragraph premise for this week’s contestant, The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi. Can you reverse-engineer their fabrications and pick out the book’s real plot? (The answer will be posted in the comments later today.)
1.) In Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, the illegal sale and slavery of elephants has become a harrowing problem in most of Asia. With the world’s supply of oil runs out, humanity must rely on methods of transportation that were once considered obsolete: zeppelins, rickshaws and the most sought-after, elephants. After years of the oil crisis, Nebula is the last cow left, and the fight for control of her might touch off an international war. Find out what happens when a group of men fight for her safety and strive to set her free.
2.) Neo-America, 2199 AD. A cabal of industrialists and politicians has abolished currency, replacing the monetary system with a network of debt-bartering that has 3/4ths of the population sold into slavery. For most, the only hope of escape is Berkdorff’s Traveling Circus, an underground cell that liberates the unusually skilled to perform thrilling acts of political terrorism. But when their newest recruit, a mysterious young girl named Charlotte Halstead, goes missing, the Circus must find her before her abilities are exploited, or before she uses their secrets to pay off her father’s debts.
3.) Shanghai, 2065. A woman stands, poised to jump, at the top of a high-rise. She takes a moment to look down at the chaotic city life below and, just as she leans forward, her suicidal silence is interrupted by a strangled cry. Startled, she turns to the sound and finds, to her considerable surprise, a baby boy. Without a thought she jumps down and picks up the child. Who left a baby on a rooftop? The answer will change her life.
4.) Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl weaves together a handful of stories in a post-oil era of rising sea levels and out-of-control mutation. A captain in the Thai Environment Ministry fights desperately to protect his beloved nation from foreign influences. An aging Chinese immigrant lives by his wits while looking for one last score. And the titular windup girl, a despised but impossibly seductive product of Japanese genetic engineering, works in a brothel until she accidentally triggers a civil war. This highly nuanced, violent, and grim tale is clearly one of the finest science fiction novels of the year.
5.) 2073: India is the world’s last democracy. It’s also the most dangerous country on the planet. In The Windup Girl, professional bio-smuggler Sreerapu Mehta takes a simple job that gets complicated in a hurry. Along the way, he must deal with crooked border guards, a troupe of theatrical thieves, air piracy, and the lawmen tasked with stopping him. When Sreerapu discovers he’s being followed, this hip sci-fi thriller takes a mind-bending postmodern turn.
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By Sean Clark, on July 30th, 2010 [Find previous installments of JABBIC here. You can suggest covers we should use by emailing us here.]
 Four of our contributors guessed the premise of Morten Ramsland’s Doghead with only this cover image available to them. Now it’s up to you: which paragraph below is based on the real novel? The answer, and who wrote which fakery, will be posted in the comments later today.
1.) Hampton J. Beagle is among the last of a dying breed. After spending his life steadily climbing the corporate ladder at the investment firm, Dogman Sacks–starting in the mail room and working his way to CEO–he now spends his days listening to the advice of entitled MBA’s who believe they know the corporate world better than he does. When he makes the decision to steer clear of an iffy real estate bubble, and invest instead in soup, dog food, and a company that makes ascots, Many of his underlings call for his resignation. Will Hampton be able to convince the board of his worth, or are his days as Top Dog numbered.
2.) Doghead is the bizarre saga of three generations of a spectacularly dysfunctional family. Patriarch Askild is a naval architect who becomes so obsessed with cubist art that his ship designs become cubist, which gets him fired by one shipyard after another until he’s forced to move to find work. It’s also the story of Askild’s wife, Bjork; their sons, Knut and Jug Ears; their nephew, Applehead; and their grandchildren. Although the book is often mordantly funny, its dominant themes can have overtones of tragedy: World War II; marital, generational, and class conflict; superstition; cruelty; violence; the absence of love; lack of communication; Scandinavian reserve; and sheer loopiness.
3.) A man wakes to find his head transplant has gone horribly awry. He now has the head of a dog. Needless to say, his life as a lowly zoo keeper will never be the same. But the world is never as it seems, as his new dog senses make perfectly clear. A funny romp through a zany world of humans, filtered through the mind of a simple, dogheaded man.
4.) Sofie Sorensen is riding high as VP of Affairs at one of Denmark’s top marketing firms — she may not be pretty, but she’s quickly becoming known as one of the best young minds in all of Copenhagen. But when NordMark hires Sven Jensen, a former classmate, to write copy, Sofie’s troubled past is unleashed. Newly haunted by her memories of being named head mutt in Sven’s “Doggie Pound Club,” Sofie slowly begins to lose her grip on her goals, her staff … and her hysterical hypertrichosis.
5.) Gnut is an ugly man. He was born that way. But that’s never deterred him when it comes to the ladies. Except one. Sera in an ex-pat from Brussels, and is immune to Gnut’s charms. So he determines to do anything to bed her, no matter how outrageous. This is a madcap novel full of twists and shenanigans. Brimming with hilarity and just a dash of wisdom, Doghead is the best novel to come out of Denmark in ages.
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By Nico Vreeland, on July 23rd, 2010 [Find previous installments of JABBIC here. You can suggest covers we should use, or volunteer to write a blurb, by emailing us here.]
 JABBIC is kind of like Balderdash with book covers. Based only on the cover at right, four of our contributors made up a one-paragraph premise for this week’s contestant, Shadow Play, by Rajorshi Chakraborti. Can you reverse-engineer their fabrications and pick out the book’s real plot? (The answer will be posted in the comments later today.)
1.) An internationally renowned novelist and commentator has disappeared from public view. What’s worse, the police want to question him about a murder; he was the last person to have met a young journalist who was later discovered dead on her doorstep. Then his editor receives a package of papers in which the writer claims to explain his part in recent events and his reasons for not surfacing. The material includes chapters from his latest work of fiction about a serial killer turned hired assassin. Is the novelist right to believe that he is being hunted, or is it his past that has finally borne down to haunt him?
2.) Professor Hugo Schmidt has discovered an entire society living in the shadows that follow us around every day. Using specially designed goggles he has studied their culture, and come to a shocking conclusion: the “Shadowkind” are preparing to invade our reality. Both a taut thriller and dark meditation on the costs of imperialism, Shadow Play represents the stirring of an exciting new political voice.
3.) Roger Tupman first saw the shadow when he was nine years old. It danced along the side of his family’s summer cottage, mimicking his movements, and taunting him to follow it around the property. For the rest of the summer, the boy and the shadow enjoyed an uneasy friendship; Roger nervous about the shadow’s intent, the shadow mocking and teasing him. As the years pass, Roger decides the shadow was a product of his overactive imagination, but he still can’t help but be nervous when his mother announces that they are returning to the lake house for another vacation. Will the shadow be there, with its twisted games? And how much worse with the games be now that Roger is sixteen?
4.) Cold War-era America has turned Alan Walsh into a paranoid patriot. A proud McCarthyist, Alan spends his days and nights fending off the Red Scare, mostly by chronicling every move his neighbors make. Alan even goes so far as to sift through their trash, looking for any sign of a communist take-over. But what happens when Alan finds a shadowy figure fishing through his own rubbish one damp night? Is he being targeted for his own out-of-the-ordinary antics? Find out in Rajorshi Chakarabori’s suspense-filled Shadow Play.
5.) Three years after municipal clerk Leonardo Forrester goes missing, renovations on his wife’s foreclosed home reveal a secret bomb shelter that leads to an intricate labyrinth of underground alleys—and unearths a conspiracy dating back decades before Forrester’s disappearance. Now detective Paul Sander must learn to play the diabolical games of a civilization of people who only leave their subterranean lair at night.
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By Sean Clark, on July 16th, 2010 [Find previous installments of JABBIC here. You can suggest covers we should use by emailing us here.]
 Four of our contributors guessed the premise of Maggie Stiefvater’s Linger with only this cover image available to them. Now it’s up to you: which paragraph below is based on the real novel? The answer, and who wrote which fakery, will be posted in the comments later today.
1.) In this allegorical Red Riding Hood story, Red must outrun and outwit the maniacal Mr. Linger if she hopes to get home in one piece. She’ll soon learn to see the forest for the trees, as greater dangers still lurk in the shadows ahead. Balancing gripping terror with magical realism, Stiefvater’s first publication is a worthy endeavor to read.
2.) It’s her first day of womanhood, and Elise finds herself lost in the forest. As she wanders in search of a way out, she finds herself followed by a pack of wildcats. A few turns too many, and Elise can do nothing but continue to walk. Followed at a distance by an increasingly vast number of wild animals, Elise’s journey stretches from hours to days. Yet she doesn’t tire. Forced to march an unending path, Elise must wonder just what hold the forest has over her, and she over the forest life, and why.
3.) Grace and Sam found each other. Now, they must fight to be together. For Grace, this means defying her parents and keeping a very dangerous secret about her own well-being. For Sam, this means grappling with his werewolf past . . . and figuring out a way to survive into the future. At turns harrowing and euphoric, Linger is a spellbinding love story that explores both sides of love — the light and the dark, the warm and the cold — in a way you will never forget.
4.) An experimental novel filtered entirely through the point of view of an anonymous lingerer who observes the lives of others from the margins: she is the figure obscured by foliage who watches from the woods, the shadow lurking on the roof of an adjacent building, and the passenger sitting three seats back in the bus staring idly out the window. Other characters are glimpsed only in snippets, allowing the reader to construct the story for his or her self from what the lingerer witnesses. In her small town, the lingerer is invisible, and the only person with a clear view of the residents. And, when the town’s children begin to dissappear, it is the lingerer who may be the only one in a position to piece together the truth…
5.) For the first 13 years of her life, Michelle has been raised in the forest by wolves. But now, as her body erupts into womanhood and she becomes more cognizant of the world around her, Michelle finds herself wondering about life’s meaning, and begins a search for someone–anyone–who can answer her questions. Linger is more than a simple re-imagining of the Jungle Book with a female protagonist; it is a clever allegory for what it means to become a woman in our own wild world.
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By Nico Vreeland, on July 9th, 2010 [Find previous installments of JABBIC here. You can suggest covers we should use, or volunteer to write a blurb, by emailing us here.]
JABBIC is kind of like Balderdash with book covers. Based only on the cover at right, four of our contributors made up a one-paragraph premise for this week’s contestant, This Must Be the Place, by Kate Racculia. Can you reverse-engineer their fabrications and pick out the book’s real plot? (The answer will be posted in the comments later today.)
1. Delilite Luggage has been hit hard by the economy. Families don’t vacation, businesses are cutting back on travel—people are staying home. Especially in Arandar, Nevada, where none of the 376 residents have left town for over two years. Arandar reeks of mold and mildew, and the streets and houses are covered in over a foot of dust. When Delilite CEO Sam Sonite hears about Arandar, he gets an idea: an emergency airdrop of Delilite luggage that will hopefully reawaken the traveling instinct in Arandar—and generate some good PR for Delilite. Will the good people of Arandar pack up and shake the dust off their feet, or will they fill the free bags with hopes and dreams and stuff them in a closet?
2. It seems like Alice Casey has spent her entire life looking for the perfect spot to settle down… without settling down. But when she is offered a job as a stewardess at an up and coming airline in Chicago, she has to decide if moving will really solve all her problems. Chicago offers a man who appreciates adventure as much as Alice does, a cat-friendly apartment, and her dream job. But is moving worth giving up her cozy life in suburban England?
3. Sixteen years ago, Amy Henderson ran away from home to become a special effects creator in Hollywood. After she is killed in an on-set accident, her widower, Arthur, finds a box of memorabilia and sets off to her hometown to understand her past. He moves into a boardinghouse run by Amy’s childhood best friend, Mona, and her teenage daughter, Oneida. Initially, Mona acts as Arthur’s emotional nurse, but as they realize they hold answers for each other about Amy, their bond grows deeper, in a story both accessibly absurd and quite touching.
4. In this modern re-imagining of Mary Poppins, Maria Popa is the mysterious new carer at Cherry Tree Orphanage. At first, Maria is just as stern and just as cross as any other carer—but the children soon find that she has a magical touch (not to mention a tiny cat who lives in her pocket). With Maria’s help, the Cherry Tree children discover the hope and joy that they’d long since forgotten. When they try to escape, however, they’ll need all the magic and tiny cats they can get.
5. Mary-Anne Claire has spent thirteen years mourning her fiancé; he disappeared in World War II, fighting as a paratrooper in the United States 101st Airborne. One bright spring afternoon in 1957, a package with a French return address appears on her doorstep. Inside, Mary-Anne finds a white, silk parachute and a yellowed photograph of a weathered house in the countryside. Could this be from her fiancé? Follow Mary-Anne’s whirlwind adventure along with her cat, Doc, in Kate Racculia’s This Must be the Place.
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By Sean Clark, on July 2nd, 2010 [Find previous installments of JABBIC here. You can suggest covers we should use by emailing us here.]
 This week’s JABBIC has a pretty intriguing and mysterious cover. Four of our contributors guessed the premise of Adam Ross’s novel with only this cover image available to them. Now it’s up to you: which paragraph below is based on the real novel? The answer, and who wrote which fakery, will be posted in the comments later today.
1.) MacDonald Rathwaite has had enough. The new gangster kids on his block call him “Mr. Peanut.” They think it’s funny, because he walks with a cane and cause his head looks weird. They think he’s stupid, they think he doesn’t notice. They don’t know him, and they sure don’t know what he’s done for a living for the past forty years—the job that gave him the limp, and shattered his skull. Rathwaite sat by when the gangsters sold drugs on his porch, and when they spray-painted the bodega on the corner. But when they start in harassing Lola, the young single mother who lives in 3C, that’s more than Rathwaite can take.
2.) It’s on the side of a tin on a shelf in every pantry in America: the smiling face of Mr. Peanut. But look closer… Conrad Frayn is a defamed illustrator and aspiring artist. When he tries to relaunch his career with a new take on a marketing icon, he soon learns that he infringed on the wrong trademark. In this Pynchon-esque thriller, Adam Ross weaves a tapestry of commercial conspiracy and personal redemption that just might have you thinking twice before you pop open your next can of cashews.
3.) A factory mishap ships a popular brand of powdered makeup with exceptionally high levels of a peanut extract, causing allergic reactions and deaths nationwide. Disfigured from the incident, male model Antoine Feinderlacht uses the situation to rewrite the rules of fashion, and of terror, in this taut and hip thriller.
4.) Nathan and his friends thought they could ruin any teacher Cedar Creek Middle School could throw at them, but Mr. Peanut, their permanent substitute shop teacher, isn’t going to crack so easily. When even their best pranks fail to temper Mr. Peanut’s ardor for woodwork and whistling, the boys come to respect and befriend their teacher, making him an honorary member of the Creek Creep Gang. And when a mysterious figure from Cedar Creek’s past shows up at school asking strange questions, they must solve the mystery of Mr. Peanut’s mermaid tattoo, or else he, and the rest of the Creek Creep Gang, will be history.
5.) Alice Pepin’s lifelong struggle with depression, insecurity, and obesity comes to an abrupt end at her kitchen table when she is found dead with a peanut lodged in her throat. She has suffered suicide by anaphylactic shock—or so claims her husband, David, a quiet computer game programmer obsessed with working and re-working a draft of his unpublished novel, a violent possible masterpiece. Gradually, the two detectives on the case begin to see disturbing parallels between their own marital dramas and the Pepins’ cruel rotations of brinkmanship and adoration.
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By Sean Clark, on June 25th, 2010 [Find previous installments of JABBIC here. You can suggest covers we should use by emailing us here.]
This week’s JABBIC might be a bit of a low blow, but it was too juicy to pass up. Basically, JABBIC is Balderdash with book covers. Four of our contributors guessed at the summary of Christine Feehan’s novel with only this cover image available to them. Can you guess which below is real? The answer, and who wrote which fakery, will be posted in the comments later today.
1.) For Kalani Devers, life is a beach and the surf is always up. Ranked at #2 on the ASP World Tour, only one person surfs in Kalani’s way — Analu Smith. That is, until the 2009 Rio de Janeiro Surfing Cup, where Kalani hangs ten and leaves Analu in his wake. But when Kalani tests positive for anabolic steroids and is stripped of his title, he disappears into the Amazon rainforest, hoping to find an undetectable herbal steroid. But life in the jungles of Brazil isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and Kalani finds his efforts dashed by deforestation. With the help of a stuffed jungle cat that harbors the soul of his deceased girlfriend Aleka, Kalani sets off on a new mission. Surfing may be a solitary activity, but saving the world is a team sport.
2.) When a prominent environmental activist meets her mysterious demise on a mission to the Amazon, her daughter, Stephanie, vows to uncover the real events that led to her death. Under the ruse of filming a documentary about her mother’s work, she heads down to the sweaty, tangled forests of Brazil. Assisted by Chico, a courageous local translator, she finds the town where her mother was last seen alive destroyed by fire. Bizarre things start happening when a rich, handsome stranger takes a passionate interest in her project, and Stephanie is forced to face a story much more shocking than she ever could have predicted.
3.) Leopard shifter Connor Vega carries the scent of a wild animal in its prime, and bears the soul-crushing sins of past betrayals. Isabeau Chandler’s never forgiven him-or forgotten him. The mating urge is still with her, and hotter than ever. Dangerously hot…
4.) Ryan Vincent was born under the sign of the leopard, and can turn into a black one–the rarest and wildest of all. When his adopted Costa Rican village finds itself threatened from a militia run by a powerful and beautiful rebel woman, he must do all he can to do to protect it. For the first time in his life as a shapeshifter, his animalistic form might not be his best body for the job.
5.) Lucius Montgomery fancies himself a bit of a Robin Hood, but he’s not quite quick-footed enough to avoid the law. Unfortunately, once he’s been captured it turns out he also lacks a record, fingerprints, and a human past. Who will help set him free? There’s only one beast who can help him, his childhood friend and closest confidante: Tara Normandy. Tara lives as a panther in the wild, avoiding her human side. In order to help Lucius clear his name Tara may have to learn to accept her humanity…and his love.
By Nico Vreeland, on June 18th, 2010 [Find previous installments of Judge a Book by Its Cover here. Suggest covers to use by emailing us here.]
Judge a Book by Its Cover is basically Balderdash for new or forthcoming books. A number of our contributors have made up synopses for an interesting-looking new book based only on its cover and title. This week, the book in question is Light Boxes, by Shane Jones.
Can you guess which of the following paragraphs is the real premise of Light Boxes, just by looking at the cover?
Answer (and who wrote which fakery) coming later today in the comments.
1. Light Boxes follows the plight of a town battling to free itself from the brutal hold of the month of February, a meanie that has not allowed its wintry grip to lift for hundreds of days. When the despairing townspeople, led by valiant Thaddeus Lowe and his wife and daughter, suffer reprisals from February for trying to break the weather, a group of former balloonists don bird masks and, calling themselves the Solution, instigate a rebellion. Thaddeus’s daughter, Bianca, is kidnapped, along with other children, leading Thaddeus to plot ways to deceive February. Will they defeat February in time to save the town?
2. Shane Jones’s Light Boxes is a fictional memoir recalling the hilarious happenstance of its own creation. One snowy Monday, Jones and friends dressed as art-house movie penguins and stormed Penguin, Ltd., demanding that the powerhouse publish his book-in-progress (the plot of which was indeed progressing before the receptionist’s eyes). Penguin’s president, Morgan Freeman, who just happens to love art houses and penguins, gave the project a quick green light. Drama ensues when the 13-page manuscript was almost pulled for brevity. Thankfully, a 100-page color insert featuring the waddle in a variety of poses saved it in production. Light Boxes is well worth the $72 cover price.
3. For generations, the Grape family has lived by the Three Iron Laws: no women, no liquor, no knives. But then their youngest son, Gabe, is kidnapped by the notorious knife-wielding, booze-swilling, womanizing Parakeet Bandits. Gabe quickly learns that the outside world is much more fun than his forebears led him to believe, and he soon joins the gang. When his oldest brother sets out to bring him back to the fold, Gabe Grape must choose between his new life as a Parakeet and his devotion to his family.
4. In the tiny, remote town of Vinchizstrasse, the men all wear masks and the women all wear veils; in fact, it’s considered a sin to show your face to another human being. One spring, as the ice thaws to snow, the townsfolk begin acting weird—Henniger the butcher attacks Mrs. Leep and Jolimar the magician kills his assistant in front of a live audience, but neither has any memory of their actions. They quickly conclude that the people of neighboring town Tulingradstock (who have always been jealous of the Vinchaise) are forging masks and impersonating the Vinchaise men while committing horrible crimes. When Henniger and Jolimar confront them, the Tulingrash insist it’s a mind-disease that’s already crippled several other towns. Can the Tulingrash be trusted? The only way the Vinchaise can know for sure is to throw away their masks, but that might be more than they can take.
5. There are only five oiseau men left, and none of them have ever seen the sun. They’re condemned to spend their lives in Lincolntown, where it’s always cold and cloudy. At the bidding of invisible overseers, the oiseau perform mundane tasks like copying notes, folding papers, and whittling trinkets. Their ignorance about the outside world doesn’t protect them from an aching emptiness as they face the certainty of their extinction. However, just a few miles away in sunny Noirville, the Herschel family hides the only oiseau who’s ever escaped, and he’s been working tirelessly on a plan to free these mysterious men the only way he knows how…
By Sean Clark, on June 11th, 2010 [Find previous installments of JABBIC here. You can suggest covers we should use by emailing us here.]
 For this round of Judge a Book by Its Cover, we’ve selected Lanceheim by Tim Davys. Only one of the summaries below is real, the others have been written by our contributors, with only the cover image to go by. See if you can guess which is the true summary of this upcoming novel.
The answer (and who wrote which fakery) will be posted in the comments later today.
1.) After his conversion in prison, the Big Bad Wolf sets out to preach the word of the Gospels that changed his life. But on the outside, his baser nature begins to reassert itself. He finds temptation everywhere in the wilderness of the outside world. He is forced to confront the misdeeds of his past while he learns to walk the paths of enlightenment all over again.
2.) Jane and Dennis Whippoorwill are brilliant behavioral psychologist out to prove that religion is a needless social construct. To rebut their many detractors, the two have experimentally raised their son, Daniel, as a follower of a made-up theology–that of the Great Fox, Lanceheim. Jane and Dennis believe that once the elementary aged Daniel expresses his beliefs, he will be ridiculed and quickly discard his God. They don’t anticipate that Daniel will have the fortitude and charisma of a prophet, and garner a cult-like following.
3.) Peering out his window early one Saturday morning Ralph, a young German boy, finds himself eye to eye with an enormous,smiling cat. The cat takes a bow and introduces himself as the Amazing Mr. Milo. Over time the cat becomes Ralph’s best friend and most trusted confidante. Mr. Milo’s even teaches Ralph several of his favorite tricks. At first Ralph is pleased with his secret playmate and their complex, extraordinary games. However, the boy’s life is threatened as he grows closer to the cat and the rules abruptly change.
4.) In a world populated by stuffed animals, composer Reuben Walrus is weeks away from finishing his new symphonic opus when he discovers that his irreversible hearing loss will be total before he can complete the task. His only hope is to seek the aid of Maximilian, a parable-spouting sage whose growing cult of followers has so alarmed authorities and deacons of the world’s orthodox church that they have driven him underground. Reuben must cope with his affliction, and the life, times, and persecution of the enigmatic Maximilian.
5.) Roger Lupin is fascinated with wolves. He talks about them constantly, always chooses them as a topic for school projects, dreams about them nightly. When a full moon opens a shimmering door in the night sky outside his bedroom window, Roger finds himself transported to Lanceheim, a world much like his own–except instead of people it’s populated by anthropomorphic wolves. At first mesmerized, Roger soon realizes finding a way home before becoming a meal to zealous wolves who make eating little boys a religious rite might not be so easy.
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