Men in Black meets The Westing Game in the middle-grade debut of the author of the Julia Vanishes trilogy! When Ben’s school project uncovers a secret society whose aim is to keep sneaks—mischievous interdimensional sprites—from slipping into our universe!
SNEAKS
by Catherine Egan
Knopf, January 2022
What starts as a boring class project takes an intergalactic turn when Ben, Akemi, and Charlotte discover that the elderly woman they’ve been assigned to interview is a member of the super secret Gateway Society—and she’s in trouble. Agatha gives them a box to keep safe and then disappears! Of course they open the box—and learn about Sneaks: interdimensional malsprites that can slip through the seals between worlds and wreak havoc. The Gateway Society usually handles Sneak attacks, but Sneaks are converging on the town in alarming numbers, and they are after the notebook and strange statue the kids found in Agatha’s box. And they want something else too: to pull a more dangerous creature through the seal. Can three misfit kids work together to decode the notebook and stop an intergalactic takeover? Can they find Agatha? Can they get their class project done on time?
This funny, fantastical adventure will leave readers checking under their beds for Sneaks that go bump in the night.
Catherine Egan grew up in Vancouver, Canada. Since then, she has lived on a volcanic island in Japan (which erupted while she was there and sent her hurtling straight into the arms of her now husband), in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Beijing, on an oil rig in the middle of Bohai Bay, then in New Jersey, and now in New Haven, Connecticut. She is currently occupied with writing books and fighting dragon armies with her warrior children. SNEAKS is her middle grade debut.
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A fearless Burmese warlord, Olive Yang dressed, smoked, fought, and loved like one of the boys, rebelling against the confines of her gender from a very young age and later carrying on eyebrow-raising love affairs with a movie starlet, a General’s wife, and her own prison warden, amongst others. Beloved and revered by her soldiers, this trailblazing woman reigned over a powerful army that controlled the Golden Triangle from the end of World War II to the early 1960s, and infamously assisted the CIA in their plan to arm militias against Communist Chinese troops. Perhaps most fascinatingly of all, this female firebrand has largely been forgotten, relegated solely to the footnotes of history books. Until a few years ago, no one even seemed to know whether Olive was alive or dead. Determined to right this wrong, Gabrielle Paluch set out on a once-in-a-lifetime journey to find Olive Yang. What she found is, as they say, stranger than fiction.
World-renowned geologist and paleontologist Gerta Keller is at the center of what has been called the nastiest feud in science, a contentious debate popularly known as “The Dinosaur Wars” over what triggered the fifth mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Era sixty-six million years ago. Dinosaurs have enthralled us for generations, and the question of what caused their demise is more relevant than ever, as humankind confronts the paroxysms of an imperiled planet and the possibility that we may become the dinosaurs of the sixth extinction.
To ensure a lasting peace, The New Society forbids anything that may cause tribal loyalties, including traditional families. Suddenly, everyone must live as Miriam has chosen to—disconnected and unattached. A researcher at heart, Miriam becomes involved in implementing this detachment process. She does not know it is the beginning of a darkly sinister program that will transform this new world and the lives of everyone in it. Eventually, the harmful effects of her research become too much for Miriam, and she devises a secret plan to destroy the system from within, and endangering her own life. But is her “confession” honest—or is it a fabrication riddled with lies meant to conceal the truth?