For Ages
9 to 12

A high-flying fantasy adventure that will blow readers away!

Every kite Oliver touches flies straight into the ground, making him the laughingstock of Windblowne. With the kite-flying festival only days away, Oliver tracks down his reclusive great-uncle Gilbert, a former champion. With Gilbert's help, Oliver can picture himself on the crest, launching into the winds to become one of the legendary fliers of Windblowne.

Then his great-uncle vanishes during a battle with mysterious attack kites—kites that seem…

An Excerpt fromWindblowne

1

Oliver sat back on his stool. He was finished. His hands were blistered, his head ached, and his nostrils burned with the stink of boiling glue, but he was sure this one would work. After a lifetime of embarrassments and disappointments that made his toes curl to think about, he’d finally done it. This time he would fly.

For two days Oliver had snipped and sewn, boiled glue in the glue pots, lit new candles when the old ones had burned down to nubs, cursed and sucked on his cuts when he was clumsy with a knife, and paced back and forth crumpling up papers covered with his carefully drawn designs before hurling them into the corners in disgust. Then he would sit at his workbench to draw up new designs, and snip and sew some more. All the while, the midsummer winds had howled ceaselessly outside the treehouse.

Oliver stood, kicking aside discarded fragments of bamboo spars. With a triumphant sweep of his arm, he cleared the workbench. Everything spilled onto the floor with a tumultuous…