by N.E. Bode (HarperCollins)

A boy named Oyster R. Motel, who is being raised in a nunnery, falls prey to the Awful MTDs (Mysterious Temporary Disappearances) and takes a ride in a silver bucket through the Gulf of Wind and Darkness to an Imagined Other World - filled with Perths, Doggers, Vicious Goggles, dragons, spider-wolves, breathing rivers - where he must defeat the evil Dark Mouth.

by N.E. Bode (Scholastic)

The film stars Dustin Hoffman, Natalie Portman, and Justin Bateman. But the Bode book is all about Mr. Magorium's wonderful life. Read how the brilliant, 243-year-old toy maker influenced the lives of Napoleon, Einstein, Jackie Robinson, Billy Jean King, and many more! Get your copy of The Amazing Compendium of Edward Magorium today!

The Anybodies

A book that loves books!

There are 39 (or so!) must-read classics mentioned in THE ANYBODIES...

Can you find them all?

Charlotte's Web; Oliver Twist; Stuart Little; Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone; Peter Pan; A Series of Unfortunate Events; The Chronicles of Narnia; The Indian in the Cupboard; Heidi; Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler; James and the Giant Peach; The Borrowers; The Hobbit; Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl; King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table; Robin Hood; Little House on the Prairie; Anne of Green Gables; The Secret Garden; Fair and Tender Ladies; Alice in Wonderland; The Wizard of Oz; Catherine, Called Birdy; Snow White and The Seven Dwarves; Little Red Ridinghood; Goldilocks and the Three Bears; Green Eggs and Ham; A Bear Called Paddington; Aesop's Fables; The Tale of Peter Rabbit; The Complete Book of Flower Fairies; The World of Bats; The Book of Presidents; The Mouse and the Motorcycle; Harold and the Purple Crayon; The Bible; Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies; The Phantom Tollbooth, Where the Sidewalk Ends.

And what books lurk within THE NOBODIES? I'm not at liberty to say! Read it and then YOU can tell ME!

The desperately, breathlessly awaited sequels to THE ANYBODIES are HERE!

I can’t say much about The Nobodies – except that Fern and Howard go to a camp populated by counselors with gills and beaks; a blind busdriver with a seeing eye dog who barks directions; a vicious mole with a flower-shaped nose! And, of course, the Nobodies are in this book, too. They’re sending Fern urgent messages stuffed into bottles! Will Fern and Howard save the Nobodies?

And The Somebodies, well, Fern and Howard narrowly escape being sent to Grave's Military Academy and escape through a golden, singing invitation to the Anybodies Convention in the City Beneath the City where they ride in a glass elevator - shaken from a book you might have once heard of - into Willy Fattler's (very grand, ever-changing) Underground Hotel and find themselves being led into battle with the new villain (a soul-sucking villain to beat all villains): The Blue Queen!

First, let's back up a minute. Maybe you haven't read book one The Anybodies just yet. Below is a summary from a starred review - I'm tooting my own horn here just in case you, like my creative writing professor, think that I am contributing to the demise of literature. I'm not! See:

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

At the heart of this inventive, far-reaching fantasy is Oyster R. Motel, an earnest 10-year-old raised in a nunnery shared by 13 nuns who have taken vows of silence - anticipating objections to a boy in a "nunnery," the author interjects: "You can't be overly rigid about the English language. (Nurses don't live in nurseries! Novels don't live in novelties!)" But as he grows up, normally and noisily, he wears out his welcome with everyone but the nun he thinks of as Sister Mary Many Pockets, who found him as an abandoned infant (she named him for the motel towel wrapped around him). On a rare venture outside, Oyster meets a old woman who maps children's Imagined Other Worlds. She tells him of two youngsters - later revealed as Oyster's parents - who once slipped inside the map they created, traveling through the Gulf of Wind and Darkness into their imagined world, never to return. Accompanied by a dachshund belonging to the nunnery's child-hating lone employee, Oyster is soon transported through that same Slippery Map to the Other World, where the evil Dark Mouth holds his parents prisoners. In a Harry Potter-esque twist, Oyster is heralded as "the boy," the long-awaited hero entreated to take up his parents' crusade to destroy the villain and end his cruel regime. Writing as Bode (The Anybodies), Julianna Baggott effortlessly renders an expansive, entertainingly quirky cast of creatures benign and malevolent. Her snappy prose makes the case for the story's explicit messages about the value of unbridled imagination. Ages 8-12.
 

KIRKUS

...[a] witty, sometimes hilarious tale, punctuated with authorial asides and featuring switched babies, hidden identities, magical transformations, and allusions to literary classics. Frequently interrupting ...[himself] to slam ...[his] creative-writing teacher, apologizing for putting in talking animals, etc., the chatty narrator follows Fern ...[11] as she is whisked a way from her beige and orderly household to the book-stuffed boarding house where her real mother, who died in childbirth, had grown up possessing both a manual for shapechanging and the ability to shake characters or items right off any printed page. As she helps her still-grieving, real father search for the manual before it can fall into the hands of a sinister magician known as The Miser, Fern discovers to her delight that she has inherited her mother's gift. Bode scatters the grounds with hobbits, fairies, clothed rabbits, teacups labeled "Drink Me," and other references for well-read children to catch, assembles a cast of fundamentally decent sorts led by a preteen with plenty on the ball, and concocts a tangled plot with a clever twist at the end, plus plenty of loose threads to connect a sequel."
 

SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL

"...There's laugh-out-loud humor, fantasy, mystery, real-life drama, and potential for a sequel. What more could a reader want?"
 

I certainly don't know! I did the best I could, you know.