The Latest Books by N.E. Bode:
SPRING 2009
The Prince of Fenway Park
by N.E. Bode (HarperCollins)
There WAS a Curse on the Boston Red Sox.
It WAS reversed.
And THIS is the boy who did it!
This novel ties together the history of baseball, Curses, pookas,
banshees, fairies, Babe Ruth, time travel, and the true meaning
of FAMILY.
Buy it now!
The Slippery Map
by N.E. Bode
(HarperCollins)
A boy named Oyster R. Motel, who is being raised in a nunnery,
falls prey to the Awful MTDs (Mysterious Temporary Disappearances)
and takes a ride in a silver bucket through the Gulf of Wind
and Darkness to an Imagined Other World - filled with Perths,
Doggers, Vicious Goggles, dragons, spider-wolves, breathing
rivers - where he must defeat the evil Dark Mouth.
The Amazing Compendium of Edward Magorium
by N.E. Bode (Scholastic)
The film stars Dustin Hoffman, Natalie Portman, and Justin
Bateman. But the Bode book is all about Mr. Magorium's wonderful life. Read how the brilliant, 243-year-old toy maker influenced the lives of Napoleon, Einstein, Jackie Robinson, Billy Jean King, and many more! Get your copy of The Amazing Compendium of Edward Magorium today!
The Nobodies
and
The Sombodies
The desperately, breathlessly
awaited sequels to THE ANYBODIES are HERE!
I can’t say much about The Nobodies – except that
Fern and Howard go to a camp populated by counselors with gills
and beaks; a blind busdriver with a seeing eye dog who barks
directions; a vicious mole with a flower-shaped nose! And,
of course, the Nobodies are in this book, too. They’re
sending Fern urgent messages stuffed into bottles! Will Fern
and Howard save the Nobodies?
And The Somebodies, well, Fern and Howard narrowly escape being sent
to Grave's Military Academy and escape through a golden, singing
invitation to the Anybodies Convention in the City Beneath the City
where they ride in a glass elevator - shaken from a book you might have
once heard of - into Willy Fattler's (very grand, ever-changing) Underground
Hotel and find themselves being led into battle with the new villain
(a soul-sucking villain to beat all villains): The Blue Queen!
First, let’s back up a minute. Maybe you haven’t read book
one The Anybodies just yet. Below is a summary from a starred review – I’m
tooting my own horn here just in case you, like my creative writing
professor, think that I am contributing to the demise of literature.
I’m not! See:
Starred Reviews
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the heart of this inventive, far-reaching fantasy is Oyster R.
Motel, an earnest 10-year-old raised in a nunnery shared by 13 nuns
who have taken vows of silence anticipating objections to a boy in a
"nunnery," the author interjects: "You can't be overly rigid about the
English language. (Nurses don't live in nurseries! Novels don't live
in novelties!)" But as he grows up, normally and noisily, he wears out
his welcome with everyone but the nun he thinks of as Sister Mary Many
Pockets, who found him as an abandoned infant (she named him for the
motel towel wrapped around him). On a rare venture outside, Oyster
meets a old woman who maps children's Imagined Other Worlds. She tells
him of two youngsters later revealed as Oyster's parents who once
slipped inside the map they created, traveling through the Gulf of
Wind and Darkness into their imagined world, never to return.
Accompanied by a dachshund belonging to the nunnery's child-hating
lone employee, Oyster is soon transported through that same Slippery
Map to the Other World, where the evil Dark Mouth holds his parents
prisoners. In a Harry Potter esque twist, Oyster is heralded as "the
boy," the long-awaited hero entreated to take up his parents' crusade
to destroy the villain and end his cruel regime. Writing as Bode (The
Anybodies), Julianna Baggott effortlessly renders an expansive,
entertainingly quirky cast of creatures benign and malevolent. Her
snappy prose makes the case for the story's explicit messages about
the value of unbridled imagination. Ages 8-12.
KIRKUS
"...[a] witty, sometimes hilarious tale, punctuated with authorial
asides and featuring switched babies, hidden identities, magical transformations,
and allusions to literary classics. Frequently interrupting ...[himself]
to slam ...[his] creative-writing teacher, apologizing for putting in
talking animals, etc., the chatty narrator follows Fern ...[11] as she
is whisked a way from her beige and orderly household to the book-stuffed
boarding house where her real mother, who died in childbirth, had grown
up possessing both a manual for shapechanging and the ability to shake
characters or items right off any printed page. As she helps her still-grieving,
real father search for the manual before it can fall into the hands
of a sinister magician known as The Miser, Fern discovers to her delight
that she has inherited her mother's gift. Bode scatters the grounds
with hobbits, fairies, clothed rabbits, teacups labeled "Drink
Me," and other references for well-read children to catch, assembles
a cast of fundamentally decent sorts led by a preteen with plenty on
the ball, and concocts a tangled plot with a clever twist at the end,
plus plenty of loose threads to connect a sequel."
SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL
"...There's
laugh-out-loud humor, fantasy, mystery, real-life drama,
and potential for a sequel. What more could a reader want?"
I certainly don't know! I did the best I could, you know.
If you've already finished the book, here's a challenge:
THE ANYBODIES
A book that loves books!
There are 39 (or so!) must-read classics mentioned in THE ANYBODIES...
Can you find them all?
Charlotte's Web; Oliver Twist; Stuart Little; Harry Potter and the
Sorcerer's Stone; Peter Pan; A Series of Unfortunate Events; The Chronicles
of Narnia; The Indian in the Cupboard; Heidi; Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory; >From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler; James
and the Giant Peach; The Borrowers; The Hobbit; Anne Frank: Diary of
a Young Girl; King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table; Robin
Hood; Little House on the Prairie; Anne of Green Gables; The Secret
Garden; Fair and Tender Ladies; Alice in Wonderland; The Wizard of Oz;
Catherine, Called Birdy; Snow White and The Seven Dwarves; Little Red
Ridinghood; Goldilocks and the Three Bears; Green Eggs and Ham; A Bear
Called Paddington; Aesop's Fables; The Tale of Peter Rabbit; The Complete
Book of Flower Fairies; The World of Bats; The Book of Presidents; The
Mouse and the Motorcycle; Harold and the Purple Crayon; The Bible; Admiral
Hornblower in the West Indies; The Phantom Tollbooth, Where the Sidewalk
Ends.
And what books lurk within THE NOBODIES? I’m not at liberty to
say! Read it and then YOU can tell ME!
