The Guardians of Knowledge: When the Books Go Bad

What does it take to be a Guardian of Knowledge?

Six kids…

• Lila Bacon, a snarky loner and frequent flyer in afterschool detention;
• Elliot Foufe, a goofball who fears his own shadow—he harbors a deep secret and a past that is unwilling to let him go;
• Meghan Brown, a perpetually stylish girl, but also an escapee from the “in crowd;”
• Kayley Hunfd, a lover of learning and writing, who works hard to keep her beloved twin brother in line;
• Bartholomew Hunfd, who prefers shooting hoops and useless trivia to actually using his intelligence for anything worthwhile;
• Ham Higgins, a massive football star, who has a secret love for books.


Whose lives will be changed…

These six kids have no idea that getting trapped in the school library marks the beginning of their training as the Guardians of Knowledge—those people who can travel into books. After escaping from the pages of a book that unleashes the power of Hurricane Andrew, a chain of events begins at Hornet Valley Middle, an otherwise ordinary school with slightly weird teachers, a strict principal, boring lectures, and more standardized tests than you can shake a sharpened #2 pencil at. All sense of normality begins to fade when impromptu food fights erupt between the teachers and students, the teachers start leading sing-a-longs about polygons, rumors abound of werewolves hanging out in the girls’ restroom, and the students start to actually laugh at the teachers’ jokes. But when other kids begin to vanish inside the library, it becomes clear that the books are taking on a life of their own and that this unlikely group of friends must stop the rogue publications and discover the source of the spreading chaos…

As they uncover why they are

The Guardians of Knowledge

A 1993 graduate of UNC Charlotte, Chip has dedicated the past 22 years to teaching high school science. He has had the pleasure of meeting wonderful and fascinating people in that time who have provided inspiration for many characters in his writing. While the field of science is not the area of expertise normally associated with an aspiring author, he has always been a dreamer and would often enter into the world of his own imagination at a moment's notice. This love of dreaming-coupled with a passion for books plus a tendency to weave storytelling into his lessons-created in him a desire to write. Building on the encouragement he had given to countless students, he followed his own dream, and his first novel, Diary of a Fed Up Teacher, was published in 2014 by Second Wind Publishing. The Guardians of Knowledge is his second published novel. He received honorable mention from the 2011 Words of Love contest sponsored by the Writer's Workshop of Asheville, NC for the short story A Lesson in Love at Haversaw High. In 2012, his short story, The Cat's in the Cradle Curio Shop won first place in a Fanstory.com postcard story contest, and was published on the website Postcard Shorts. In 2012, his short story, The Reason Why Grandmothers Should Not Be Allowed To Read Vampire Novels placed 2nd in a Fanstory.com panel reviewed contest. Also in 2012, he was a finalist out of 1,400 entries in a Writer's Digest "First Things First" contest for writing a prompted opening sentence. The finalists' opening sentences are printed in the January 2013 edition of Writer's Digest. Two of his short stories, The Reason Why Grandmothers Should Not Be Allowed To Read Vampire Novels and Prairie Zombies, are included in the anthology Off The Beaten Path published by Prospective Press. Most recently, his manuscript Mr. Judy: The Advice Man advanced to the Quarter Finalist stage of the 2014 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards. He has been married for twenty years and has two daughters, ages eleven and thirteen. He lives in North Carolina.