Brewster Gaines just wanted to make a video and get a million views—he didn’t count on needing friends to get there. From the author of Spontaneous and the Locker 37 series comes a heartfelt story of friendship, family, and filmmaking.
A MILLION VIEWS
by Aaron Starmer
Penguin Workshop, October 2022
(via Dystel, Goderich & Bourret)
Brewster Gaines loves everything about making videos. The planning, the filming, the editing, and especially the feeling of watching his YouTube views tick up and up. So what if he doesn’t have friends to film with or parents who are home every night for dinner? He’s got a phone and a tripod and a lofty goal: A million views. But when he enlists the acting chops of charismatic new kid Carly for a ten-second video, he gets more than he bargained for. Her intimidating friend Rosa soon steps in with funding to produce an epic fantasy trailer, and before long, their tiny team is adding cast and crew. What started as a simple shoot mutates into a full-fledged movie production, complete with method-acting cosplayers, special effects, and a monster made out of a go-kart. That’s when Brewster realizes that getting to a million views may be harder than he ever imagined . . .
Aaron Starmer was born in northern California and raised in the suburbs of Syracuse, New York. Before pursuing writing full-time, he worked in New York City for over ten years as an editor for a travel bookseller and as an operations director for an African safari company. His middle grade and young adult novels have been translated into multiple foreign languages and have appeared on best of the year lists from Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, New York Public Library, YALSA, Bank Street College of Education, Chicago Public Library and School Library Journal. He lives in Vermont with his wife and two daughters.
Sibyl loves possibilities, and at the Grand Mirror Hotel everything seems possible. It might even be possible that one day her grandmother will let her open the Book of Advanced and Dangerous Magic. Sibyl is the apprentice hotel witch. Under the watchful care of her grandmother she is memorising spell patterns to keep the hotel staff and guests happy. But the spells don’t always go exactly as planned: sometimes the spell to make the cakes rise works a little too well, and eclairs and chocolate cakes float up to the ceiling.
Book 1: STACEY CASEY AND THE HOUSE THAT TIME REMEMBERED
Book 2: STACEY CASEY AND THE CHEEKY OUTLAW
Book 6: THE ADVENTURERS AND THE SEA OF DISCOVERY
Mick is a good kid, but maybe he can use just a little guidance. But it’s unclear who will be guiding whom, because Mick’s brother came home from Tibet with the self-proclaimed Guru Lumpo Smythe-Finkel and his dog Lhasa―and then promptly settled both of them in Mick’s bedroom. The thing about this kind of guru is that he doesn’t seem to know exactly what he’s trying to do. He sure does seem to be hungry, though. So Mick agrees to something like a quest, roaming the suburbs with the oddest group of misfits: Lumpo and Lhasa; graffiti-fanatic Verne; and Verne’s unusual friend Molly. Molly is a Dwergish girl―don’t worry if you don’t know what that is yet―and she seems to be going off the rails a bit. Along the way, the gang will get invited to a rollicking ghost party, consult a very strange little king, and actually discover the truth about Heaven. Or a version of the truth anyway, because in a Daniel Pinkwater tale, the truth is never the slightest bit like what you’re expecting.