When chubby, geeky Wylder Wallace spills lunch on cool and aloof Addy Crowe at Toronto's Comicon, she dashes to the bathroom, leaving behind the latest issue of her uncle's steampunk comic FLYNN GOSTER in GOLD RUSH TRAIN . Wylder, a fan of the Flynn comics, opens this new one eagerly, astounded to see the girl who was just yelling at him inside the comic. Fascinated, he follows Addy into the bathroom, and the adventure begins... Is there a personality conflict? Oh, yes. Addy wants to go home; Wylder wants to stay and explore the world of Viminy Crowe's comic book. Do things go wrong? You bet they do, from the very start, when Addy loses her pet rat, Catnip, and almost gets shot by a Red Rider. All the while the actual comic book story is going on around them. The train carries a fortune from the Yukon goldfields, and both dashing Flynn Goster (hero of a thousand disguises and thief extraordinaire) and villainous Professor Aldous Lickpenny (criminal genius, aided by malevolent robots but somewhat hampered by doltish nephew Nevins) have plans to steal the gold. There's romance too—Flynn's old flame, the brilliant aviatrix, Isadora Fortuna, is traveling across Canada with her balloon, and her strangely familiar protégée Nelly Day. Addy and Wylder navigate the story with the aid of the comic book itself. Every page turn sends them to a different setting, from the Banff Springs Hotel to an alligator-wrestling arena in Florida. But when they finally find a portal back to the real world, catastrophe follows ... A hilarious thrill-ride of a story that will have kids laughing and on the edge of their seats with every turn of the page.
Authors
I was born with very little hair and very little feet and hands. They all grew together and I still have them, together with all my organs except tonsils. I do not have four children—they have me and we all know it. I write and teach and talk about writing and other things. Actually, I talk a lot. I’m right handed, my car has a dent in the passenger side door, and my blood type is A-. The motto of South Carolina is Dum spiro spero.— success comes by breathing. I like black licorice and rice pudding and ratatouille and coffee. Lots of coffee. My hair usually needs cutting. How much more do you need to know about anybody? I have been writing since 1996. No, that's not true. I wrote for years before that, but no one cared. Since 1996 I've published fifteen books for adults and children. You can read more about them somewhere else on this site. A few of the books did very well. Some came close. A couple didn't do well at all. My most recent offering is Ink Me, a tragicomedy about a tattoo gone wrong, told in supercool phonetic speak by our learning-disabled hero. Zomboy – an undead story – is due out next year. (My editor and I are arguing about certain scenes right now.) And I am writing a semi-graphic novel about kids who fall into a comic book. Do you want more details? Really? Okay, then. In 1996 I published my first novel, Crosstown (Toronto: The Riverbank Press), which was short-listed for the City of Toronto Book Award. Humorous short pieces about my life as an at-home dad with four small children used to appear regularly in the Globe & Mail and Chatelaine, and can still be found fairly regularly on the back page of Today's Parent. I reworked some of this material into a full-length chunk of not-quite-non-fiction, which was published by HarperCollins as Still Life With Children. I started writing children's fiction in 1998. Two middle-school novels, The Nose From Jupiter and The Way To Schenectady did well enough to require sequels. There are four Norbert books so far, and two Peelers. My work has received a lot of attention in Canada and The United States. The Nose From Jupiter is a Canadian bestseller. It won a Mr Christie Book Award, was on most of the top ten lists and has been translated into a Scottish dozen languages (that’s less than 12). Bun Bun’s Birthday, From Charlie’s Point of View, Mystical Rose, and Into the Ravine made a variety of short lists and books of the year – Quill and Quire, Canadian Library Association, Globe and Mail, Chicago Public Library, Time Out NY (kids), blah blah. Ink Me is part of the “7” series – linked novels featuring seven grandsons with quests from their common grandfather. Pretty cool, eh? As my most recent book, it is my current favorite. But watch out for Zomboy next year. It’s a killer!
