For Ages
8 to 12

Fans of Jerry Spinelli's Maniac Magee and Louis Sachar's Holes will enjoy this story about a boy and the ancient secrets that hide deep in the heart of the Florida everglades near a place called Muck City.

When Charlie moves to the small town of Taper, Florida, he discovers a different world. Pinned between the everglades and the swampy banks of Lake Okeechobee, the small town produces sugar cane . . . and the fastest runners…

An Excerpt fromBoys of Blur

One
MUCK
Out in the muck, where a sea of sugarcane stops and swamps begin, sitting beside a lake bigger than some countries, there is a town called Taper.
Taper has only one hill, a flat-topped mound just above the northern edge of town, ringed by cane. On that mound is an old white church with nothing but a stump where its steeple used to be before it was torn away by some long-forgotten hurricane. As for the church bell, it crashed through the floorboards and settled into the soft ground below. It’s still down there, under the patched floor, ringing silence in the muck.
Most Sundays, the little church sees a few cars, and a minister under a wobbling ceiling fan preaching at old men and women who have heard it all before. But when this story starts, one of those men has moved right on beyond old and straight into dead. There’s a whole herd of cars parked below that white church, and a whole herd of people standing around the rusty iron fence that cages in…

Under the Cover