The Slippery Map

If you've ever whiled away an afternoon dreaming of another world, then you know that place is real.

Oyster R. Motel has dreamed of another world for almost his whole life. (But that's only understandable—he's been raised in a nunnery. Do you think nuns approve of swinging from the belfry? Of raising tadpoles in the holy water? Of playing the organ at all hours? They do not.)

Oyster didn't even know that imaginations could be mapped; he barely knew he had an imagination. But then a gust of wind and a distant voice send him on a dizzying ride in a silver bucket, and Oyster finds himself, his own map in hand, in someone else's imaginary world—a place where rivers breathe and sugar snows down from the sky. Whose world is it? And what does it have to do with Oyster's map? You'll have to read the book to find out.

Imagine that.

The elusive and charming N. E. Bode writes from a secret locale beneath a giant, unmarked tree in the middle of Central Park. Some great works born from this hidden perch include The Anybodies, The Nobodies, and The Somebodies. N. E. Bode would also like to mention the books of Julianna Baggott, trusted friend, who writes novels and poetry for grown-ups and lives in the Florida panhandle.

Brandon Dorman lives in Puyallup, Washington, and is the creator of Pirates of the Sea! and Santa's Stowaway, and the illustrator of Jack Prelutsky's Be Glad Your Nose Is on Your Face, as well as Halloween Night, by Marjorie Dennis Murray.