Showing results by author "Pete Hautman" in All Categories

Competitive eating vies with family expectations in a funny, heartfelt novel for middle-grade audiences by National Book Award winner Pete Hautman.

Brian and Roni are looking for another case to crack when Roni finds an age-progressed picture of a boy who looks alarmingly like Brian on a missing children website. Brian is sure it is only a coincidence - after all, he's lived happily with his adoptive parents for as long as he can remember. But then again, his parents have never really told him about his adoption... Could there be more to his family history than he knows? As Roni and Brian piece together the clues, other people emerge from the shadows of the past and suddenly Brian isn't just a detective on the case.

Seven square miles of paradise, surrounded by an eight-foot chain-link fence: this is Nodd, the land of the Grace. It is all seventeen-year-old Jacob knows. Beyond the fence lies the World, a wicked, terrible place, doomed to destruction. When the Archangel Zerachiel descends from Heaven, only the Grace will be spared the horrors of the apocalypse.

Kosh did not feel courageous. Looking at the disko, it was all he could do not to collapse into a quaking, blubbering puddle of terror. He was half certain he was going to die. But the alternative — leaving Emma in the hands of Gheen without even trying to rescue her — was unthinkable. He would not want to live if he had to live with that. In present-day Hopewell, an adult Kosh Feye discovers a sweet and painful piece of his past when he’s rescued by the Lamb Emma.

More than half a millennium in the future, in the shadow of the looming Cydonian Pyramid, a pampered girl named Lah Lia has been raised for one purpose: to be sacrificed through one of the mysterious diskos that hover over the pyramid’s top. But just as she is about to be killed, a strange boy appears from the diskos, providing a cover of chaos that allows her to escape and launching her on a time-spinning journey in which her fate is irreversibly linked to his.The second book in the Klaatu Diskos trilogy, The Cydonian Pyramid continues the story of the enigmatic girl who changed Tucker Feye’s life.

Steven Gerald Gabel - a.k.a. Stiggy - needs to get out of Minnesota. His father recently look his own life, his mother is a shell of the person she used to be, and his sort-of-girlfriend ghosted him and skipped town. What does he have left to stick around for? Armed with his mom's credit card and a tourist map of Great River Road, Stiggy sets off in his dad's car.

“Hatred combined with lies and secrets can break the world.” Grandpa Zach used to say that before he died, but Stuey never really knew what he meant. It was kind of like how he used to talk about quantum physics or how he used to say ghosts haunted their overgrown golf course. But then one day, after Stuey and his best friend, Elly Rose, spend countless afternoons in the deadfall in the middle of the woods, something totally unbelievable happens.

The first time Tucker saw the disk, his father disappeared into thin air. The Reverend Adrian Feye had climbed onto the roof to fix a loose shingle - and suddenly he was gone. An hour later, the Reverend came walking up the road, tattered and sunburned, bringing with him an unspeaking, yellow-haired, dark-eyed girl. He refused to say where he had been, instead declaring that there would be no more prayer in the Feye house: He had lost his faith. Now Tucker’s family is unraveling.

Ordinarily, Roni and Brian would have nothing to do with each other. But today isn’t an ordinary day: their snobby classmate Alicia Camden has been snatched. Soon enough, Roni and Brian are on the case. But as they dig deeper into the mystery, they find nothing but suspects: Alicia’s hothead boyfriend Maurice, her creepy stepfather, and even Driftwood Doug, the hobo who always seemed to be watching Alicia from the woods. It’s up to Roni and Brian to find Alicia and reveal the shocking secret that led to her disappearance.

Evan doesn’t seem to fit in at school or at home. He goes out of his way to avoid attention. He sits at the back of the bus, keeps his head down in class, and keeps to himself. But when a burr-covered border collie—a survivor with a gut instinct about the Boy—starts following him around and joining him on his runs, Evan’s simple duck-and-dodge existence becomes a lot more complicated… a lot more like life.

For Annie's tenth birthday, her papa gives her a pad of paper, some colored pencils, and the Klimas family secret. It’s called the nuodeema burna, or eater of sins. Every time Annie does something wrong, she writes it down and sticks the paper in a hidden hole in the floor of their house. But Annie is quick to discover that her inheritance has a dark side.