Vin and the Dorky Duet by Maggie Lyons
Middle Grade Action Adventure
Back Cover:
Vin and the Dorky Duet
When he walks through the door and sees the
sharky grin on his sister’s face, Vin rightly suspects Meg is hatching a plot.
Worse still, he’s central to the outcome. Meg tells him everyone expects him to
play her duet for trumpet and piano at the student concert. Vin is
horrified. His only escape is to persuade another trumpet player to take
his place. Meg has the hunky Brad Stewart in mind, and she challenges Vin to
introduce her to him. To do that he must first befriend Brad’s nerdy brother,
Eyeballs, the last person Vin wants to be friends with until Meg’s promise of a
David Beckham autographed soccer jersey changes the seventh-grader’s mind. He
has five days to accomplish his mission—Operation BS.Vin’s game plan, thwarted
by exploding fish tanks, magnetic compost heaps, man-eating bubble baths, and
other disasters ultimately succeeds, but not exactly as he expects …
Excerpt:
During break I went to the library,
a favorite nerd hangout I avoided as much as possible. I walked slowly around
the stacks, pretending to look for a book until I spotted Eyeballs sitting by
himself in a corner. You couldn’t miss him. His feet stuck out from the desk
and his red and purple plaid socks glowed so much they made my eyes bug out. As
he read a book, two inches away from his nose, he made notes with one hand and
held down the pages with his other hand because a ceiling fan was flipping
them. That gave me my brilliant idea.
“I’ve
got the perfect paper weight.” I sat next to him and fished Uncle Jack’s key
chain out of my pocket. I slapped it on Eyeballs's book. The grey whales bobbed
crazily around in their mini-ocean.
“Eeuw!
What’s that?” Eyeballs squinted at the page through the glass bricks on his
nose.
I wanted to say,
"A key chain, you moron," but that wouldn’t have been a good idea,
especially because Eyeballs wasn’t looking at the key chain. He was staring at
a gob of green goo that inched across the page. The ball had cracked, spilling
the whales’ ocean. Eyeballs picked up the key chain with a paper napkin,
dropped it on the floor, and dabbed at the page with another clean napkin. Who
else but Eyeballs would have had paper napkins in his pocket?
“You’ve
stained my library book.”
It
surprised me that a nerdy person like Eyeballs could say anything so obvious.
He looked at me as if I’d totally destroyed a sacred object, blown up a statue
of Einstein or something.
“You
could try using bleach. My mom swears by it.” I knew as soon as I’d spoken I
shouldn’t have said that.
“First,
perhaps you haven’t noticed, but I don’t have any bleach.” Eyeballs’s voice hit
me colder than the gym shower. “Second, you can’t use it on paper. When I get
home, I can try to get it out with French chalk and an iron.”
“I’m sorry, Eye … er … Binkley. You can keep the key chain.” The heat
in my face reached melt-down, dangerous enough to clear the entire library,
which I sprinted out of, leaving Eyeballs staring at the beached whales.
COMING SOON:
Dewi and
the Seeds of Doom
When Dewi is clobbered by a falling rat, the
nosy Welsh dragon snoops his way into a challenging predicament. Helped by a
toad with a passion for chemical wart cures, Dewi discovers that a megalomaniac
baron is secretly breeding mutant corn at an unfriendly castle. To thwart the
genetically modified-corn baron’s sickening plan, he must use moxie and
firepower in a series of catastrophe-skirting capers.
Excerpt:
Peering from side
to side and looking over his shoulder every now and then, Dewi trotted on
tiptoes down a corn row to the back of the greenhouse, where he found two boxes
of corn kernels. One box was labeled “Cornus normalus picked today” and the
other was labeled “Cornus ghastly messus picked today.” Dewi scooped up a few
kernels from each box and put them in his knapsack. He was halfway back to the
door when he heard footsteps coming toward the greenhouse. One foot dragged
along the ground and the other clunked in a weird tango:
sch—schlep—schlep—clunk, sch—schlep—schlep—clunk. Dewi crouched behind the
corn. A lopsided shape lurched through the doorway. It belonged to a
hunchbacked dwarf who was talking to himself.
“Peegor, fetch
that test tube. Peegor, did you throw that dead rat out? Peegor, did you fan
the corn? I swear that old fart will be the death of me. I’ve a good mind to
quit right now. I don’t care if his royal pain-in-the-neckness threatens to
stuff me full of rat tails. I wish you’d rot, Baron Snot. Ha-de-ha-ha!” The
dwarf raised a leg as if he were about to kick someone in the rear end, or
worse. Then he wobbled and fell over.
After muttering a
few fantastically rude words, he picked himself up, limped to a faucet, and
filled a watering can. He began to water the first row of corn, hobbling down
one side and up the next. Still crouching behind the second row of corn, Dewi
breathed in to make himself thinner. The dwarf was getting closer. Dewi held
his breath. This wasn’t easy, because a bee had landed on his nose. He crossed
his claws and tried not to sneeze.
The dwarf was only seconds away when the bee
flew off the dragon’s nose. As he followed the bee out of the corner of his
eye, Dewi noticed a plant pot right behind his tail. Quiet as a snowflake, he
picked up the pot and threw it as far from the greenhouse door as he could. It
smashed through a pane of glass at the end of the building. The dwarf dropped
his watering can and schlep-clunked at top speed down the corn row toward the
broken glass. He was so close when he rushed by that Dewi could smell
three-day-old blood pudding and onions on his breath.
1 comment:
Hi Maggie,
Great excerpts.. you have to hate it when the whale's ocean escapes just when you want to impress Blinky. I feel for your main character.
Hunchback dwarves, exploding fish tanks, magnetic compost heaps, man-eating bubble baths.. a perfect combination. LOL.
These are wonderful examples to entice readers!
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