The Extremely High Tide! (Secrets of Topsea)

Talise knows more about the ocean than any kid in Topsea. Any adult, too. As the best-and only-bathymetrist in Topsea, Talise is able to predict important things about the sea, like the next tide (Severely Low with a threat of Wildcard) or the arrival of Seaweed Season. What she can't predict, however, are her classmates' behaviors. Sometimes it's as if they're speaking different languages.

When Talise discovers a mysterious message in a bottle, her classmates believe it must have been sent by someone stranded on a deserted island. (Not to be confused with a dessert island.) But Talise is convinced the message is meant for her. And it's telling her to build a boat.

Everyone seems to think Talise is just being silly. Even Talise isn't exactly sure why she has to build the boat. And who keeps sending those strange bottled messages, anyway? All Talise knows is that she'd better finish building her boat fast, because an Extremely High Tide is coming?

Kir Fox (Kirsten Hubbard) and M. Shelley Coats (Michelle Schusterman) are great friends, longtime critique partners, and ardent consumers of the strange and unusual. Kirsten is the author of the middle-grade novels Watch the Sky and Race the Night (Disney-Hyperion), and the young adult novels Like Mandarin and Wanderlove (Delacorte Press/Random House Children's Books). She lives in Los Angeles.

Michelle is the author of the middle grade series I Heart Band and The Kat Sinclair Files (Grosset/Penguin), and the middle-grade novels Olive and the Backstage Ghost and Spell & Spindle (Random House Children's Books). She is also the coauthor of the YA novel The Pros of Cons (Scholastic). She lives in Dallas, Texas.