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Mr. Lemoncello's Great Library Race

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Can you find your way out of what James Patterson calls the “coolest library in the world”? Mr. Lemoncello has created the race of a lifetime, and Kyle' Keeley is determined to win it. On your marks. Get set. Lemon, cello, GO!
 
From the coauthor of I Funny and Max Einstein—and with 100+ weeks on the New York Times bestseller list—the LEMONCELLO books are laugh-out-loud, puzzle-packed MUST-READS for classrooms and homes across America. 
 
Everyone’s favorite game maker, Mr. Lemoncello, is testing out his new FABULOUS FACT-FINDING FRENZY game! Kyle and the other lucky finalists will go on a great race—by bicycle, bookmobile, and even Mr. Lemoncello’s corporate banana jet!—to find fascinating facts about famous Americans, and win spectacular prizes! But when a few surprising “facts” about Mr. Lemoncello surface, it might just be GAME OVER!
 
Don’'t miss the bonus puzzle in the back! Look for the rest of the puzzle-packed series—Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library, Mr. Lemoncello’'s Library Olympics, Mr. Lemoncello’'s All-Star Breakout Game, and Mr. Lemoncello and the Titanium Ticket!
 
PRAISE FOR THE SERIES:

44 STATE AWARD LISTS AND COUNTING
100+ WEEKS ON THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LIST
* “A worthy successor to the original madman puzzle-master himself, Willy Wonka.” —Booklist, starred review
This was a game Kyle Keeley refused to lose. 
For the first time since Mr. Lemoncello’s famous library escape contest, he was up against his old nemesis, Charles Chiltington. 
“Surrender, Keeley!” Charles jeered from three spaces ahead. “Chiltingtons never lose!” 
“Except, you know, when they do!” shouted Kyle’s best friend, Akimi Hughes. She was ten spaces behind Kyle and couldn’t stand seeing Charles in the lead. 
The life-size board game had been rolled out like a plastic runner rug around the outer ring of tables in the Rotunda Reading Room of Mr. Lemoncello’s library. 
“The game’s not over until it’s over, Charles,” Kyle said with a smile. 
He had landed on a bright red question mark square, while Charles was safe on “Free Standing.” A shaky collection of drifting holograms hovered over their heads, suspended in midair beneath the building’s magnificent Wonder Dome. The dome’s giant video screens were dark so they wouldn’t interfere with the ghostly green images creating what Mr. Lemoncello called a Rube Goldberg contraption—a device deliberately designed to perform a very simple task in an extremely complicated way.
Most Rube Goldberg contraptions involve a chain reaction. In Mr. Lemoncello’s Rickety-Trickety Fact or Fictiony game, a new piece of the chain was added every time one of the players gave an incorrect answer. If someone reached the finish line before all the pieces lined up, they won. However, if any player gave one too many wrong answers, they would trigger the chain reaction and end up trapped under a pointed dunce cap.
They would lose.
“Are you ready for your question, Mr. Keeley?” boomed Mr. Lemoncello, acting as the quiz master.
“Yes, sir,” said Kyle.
“Fact or fiction for six,” said Mr. Lemoncello, reading from a bright yellow game card. “At five feet four inches, George Washington was the shortest American president ever elected. Would you like to answer or do the research?”
It was a tough choice, especially since Kyle didn’t know the answer.
If he did the research, he’d have to go back one space and lose a turn so he could look up the correct answer on one of the tablet computers built into the nearby reading desk.
But while he was researching, Charles might surge ahead. He might even make it all the way to the finish line.
On the other hand, even though Kyle didn’t know the answer, if he said either “fact” or “fiction,” he had a fifty-fifty chance of being right and moving forward six spaces, putting him in front of Charles, and that much closer to victory.
Of course, Kyle also had a fifty-fifty chance of being wrong and adding what might be the final hologram to the wobbly contraption overhead.
“Do the research, Kyle!” urged Akimi.
“Please do,” sneered Charles.
“Yo!” shouted another one of Kyle’s best buds, Miguel Fernandez. “Don’t let Chiltington get under your dome, bro. He’s just playing mind games with you.”
“Impossible.” Charles sniffed. “Keeley doesn’t have a mind for me to play with.”
“Uh, uh, uh,” said Mr. Lemoncello. “Charles, I wonder if, just this once, you might choose kind?” He turned to Kyle. “Well, Mr. Keeley? No one can make this decision for you, unless, of course, you hire a professional decider, but trust me—they are decidedly expensive. Are you willing to put everything on a waffle and take a wild guess?”
Kyle hated losing a turn when the whole idea was to win the game. He hated going backward when the object was to move forward. 
He studied the teetering collection of holograms suspended under the darkened dome. He looked at Charles, who was sneering back at him smugly.
“I want to answer, sir.”
“Very well,” said Mr. Lemoncello. “Let me repeat the question before the cucumbers I had for lunch repeat on me: At five feet four inches, George Washington was the shortest American president ever elected. Fact or fiction?”
Kyle took a deep breath. He remembered some teacher once saying people were shorter back in the olden days. So odds were that Washington was a shrimp.
“That, sir,” he said, “is a . . . fact?”
A buzzer SCRONKed like a sick goose.
“Sorry,” said Mr. Lemoncello. “It is, in fact, fiction. At six feet three inches, George Washington was one of our tallest presidents. It’s time to add another piece to our dangling-dunce-cap-trap contraption.”
Electronic notes diddled up a scale.
“Oh, dear,” said Mr. Lemoncello. “It looks like that’s the last straw!”
A hologram of a striped milk carton straw floated into place. It shot a spitball at a hologram of an old-fashioned cash register, which hit a button, which made the cash drawer pop open with a BING! The drawer smacked a holographic golf ball, which BOINKed down seven steps of a staircase one at a time until it bopped into a row of dominoes, which started to tumble in a curving line. The final domino triggered a catapult, which fired a Ping-Pong ball, which smacked a rooster in the butt. The bird cock-a-doodle-dooed, which startled a tiny man in a striped bathing suit standing on top of a fifty-foot ladder so much that he leapt off, spiraled down, and landed with a splash in a wooden bucket, which, since it was suddenly heavier, pulled a rope that struck a match, which lit a fuse, which ignited a fireworks rocket, which blasted off, which knocked the dunce cap off its hook.
The holographic hat of shame fell and covered Kyle like an upside-down ice cream cone.
“Loser!” crowed Charles.
Everybody else laughed.
By taking a wild guess, Kyle hadn’t gone backward or lost a turn.
But he’d definitely lost the game! 
 
 
 
PRAISE FOR THE SERIES:

New York Times bestselling series
 
"Discover the coolest library in the world." —James Patterson
 
"Lots of Action action and quirky humor." —The Washington Post
 
* "A worthy successor to the original madman puzzle-master himself, Willy Wonka." —Booklist, starred review
 
* "A winner for readers and game-players alike." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
 
* "A fun-filled, suspenseful intellectual puzzle." —Shelf Awareness, starred review
 
"Will have readers racing to pick up the next volume." —School Library Journal
© Elena Seibert

When I talk to kids about my new book THE ISLAND OF DR. LIBRIS, I torture them with a tale of electronics deprivation.
     "My main character, Billy Gillfoyle," I say, "is spending the summer in a cabin on a lake.  There is no cable, no TV, no DVR, no X-Box, no PlayStation 3.  There isn't even an old-fashioned VCR."
     By this point, the kids' gasps become audible.
     "On his first day at the cabin," I continue, "Billy drops his iPhone and it shatters.  The nearest Apple store is several hundred miles away."
     Jaws drop.  The kids are practically weeping – just like my hero, Billy Gillfoyle.  He mopes around the cabin after the demise of his iPhone and ends up in this scene with his mother:
    
  "Billy, what do you think kids did back before video games or TV or even electricity?"
  "I don't know.  Cried a lot?"  He plopped down dramatically on the couch.
  "No, Billy. They read books.  They made up stories and games.  They took nothing and turned it into something."
 
     And that's what happens to Billy in this book:  He learns to start using and trusting his own imagination.
     Characters from books that he reads in Dr. Libris' study start coming to life out on the island in the middle of the lake.   In no time, Hercules, the monster Antaeus, Robin Hood, Maid Marian, The Three Musketeers, D'Artagnan, Pollyanna, and Tom Sawyer are all bumping into each other's stories.  It's up to Billy, with the help of his new friend Walter, and a bookcase filled with classic literature, to "imagine" a scenario that will bring all the conflicts to a tidy resolution. 
     Yep.  In THE ISLAND OF DR. LIBRIS, Billy Gillfoyle is learning how to become a writer.  He puts his characters into situations and conflicts that will, ultimately, take him to the happy ending he, and everybody else, is looking for.
     When all seems lost, he is on the island with his new friends Robin Hood, Maid Marian, and Hercules, despairing that he's not heroic enough to rescue his asthmatic friend Walter from the clutches of the evil Space Lizard (yes, hideous creatures from video games and fairy tales eventually come to life on the island, too.) 
 
  "Ho, lads and lassie!" said Robin Hood.  "All is not lost!  Look you, Sir William – I remember a time when Sir Guy of Gisbourne held me captive in his tower.  Did my band of merry followers let a moat or castle walls stand in their way?"
  "Nay!" said Marian.  "Little John and I didst lead the charge.  Oh, how the arrows did fly that day!"
  "I'm not Little John," Billy said quietly.  "Or you, Maid Marian.  I'm not a hero."  He looked down at Walter's inhaler.  "I'm just a kid who can't even save his own family."
  "Nonsense," said Maid Marian. "Each of us can choose who or what we shall be.  We write our own stories, Sir William.  We write them each and every day."
  "And," added Hercules, "if you write it boldly enough, others will write about you, too."
 
     In my book ESCAPE FROM MR. LEMONCELLO'S LIBRARY, I wanted to make young readers excited about reading and doing research.  I tried to turn a trip to the library into an incredibly fun scavenger hunt, filled with puzzles and surprises.  (In my perpetually twelve-years-old mind, that's what doing research actually is.)
     With THE ISLAND OF DR. LIBRIS, I am hoping to excite young readers about the power and awesomeness of their own imaginations. I want them to take nothing and turn it into something.  To take two old ideas, toss them together, and create something new.
     And, when they write their own stories, maybe some of them will decide they want to become authors, writing stories for the rest of us, too!
     
     
 

View titles by Chris Grabenstein

About

Can you find your way out of what James Patterson calls the “coolest library in the world”? Mr. Lemoncello has created the race of a lifetime, and Kyle' Keeley is determined to win it. On your marks. Get set. Lemon, cello, GO!
 
From the coauthor of I Funny and Max Einstein—and with 100+ weeks on the New York Times bestseller list—the LEMONCELLO books are laugh-out-loud, puzzle-packed MUST-READS for classrooms and homes across America. 
 
Everyone’s favorite game maker, Mr. Lemoncello, is testing out his new FABULOUS FACT-FINDING FRENZY game! Kyle and the other lucky finalists will go on a great race—by bicycle, bookmobile, and even Mr. Lemoncello’s corporate banana jet!—to find fascinating facts about famous Americans, and win spectacular prizes! But when a few surprising “facts” about Mr. Lemoncello surface, it might just be GAME OVER!
 
Don’'t miss the bonus puzzle in the back! Look for the rest of the puzzle-packed series—Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library, Mr. Lemoncello’'s Library Olympics, Mr. Lemoncello’'s All-Star Breakout Game, and Mr. Lemoncello and the Titanium Ticket!
 
PRAISE FOR THE SERIES:

44 STATE AWARD LISTS AND COUNTING
100+ WEEKS ON THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LIST
* “A worthy successor to the original madman puzzle-master himself, Willy Wonka.” —Booklist, starred review

Excerpt

This was a game Kyle Keeley refused to lose. 
For the first time since Mr. Lemoncello’s famous library escape contest, he was up against his old nemesis, Charles Chiltington. 
“Surrender, Keeley!” Charles jeered from three spaces ahead. “Chiltingtons never lose!” 
“Except, you know, when they do!” shouted Kyle’s best friend, Akimi Hughes. She was ten spaces behind Kyle and couldn’t stand seeing Charles in the lead. 
The life-size board game had been rolled out like a plastic runner rug around the outer ring of tables in the Rotunda Reading Room of Mr. Lemoncello’s library. 
“The game’s not over until it’s over, Charles,” Kyle said with a smile. 
He had landed on a bright red question mark square, while Charles was safe on “Free Standing.” A shaky collection of drifting holograms hovered over their heads, suspended in midair beneath the building’s magnificent Wonder Dome. The dome’s giant video screens were dark so they wouldn’t interfere with the ghostly green images creating what Mr. Lemoncello called a Rube Goldberg contraption—a device deliberately designed to perform a very simple task in an extremely complicated way.
Most Rube Goldberg contraptions involve a chain reaction. In Mr. Lemoncello’s Rickety-Trickety Fact or Fictiony game, a new piece of the chain was added every time one of the players gave an incorrect answer. If someone reached the finish line before all the pieces lined up, they won. However, if any player gave one too many wrong answers, they would trigger the chain reaction and end up trapped under a pointed dunce cap.
They would lose.
“Are you ready for your question, Mr. Keeley?” boomed Mr. Lemoncello, acting as the quiz master.
“Yes, sir,” said Kyle.
“Fact or fiction for six,” said Mr. Lemoncello, reading from a bright yellow game card. “At five feet four inches, George Washington was the shortest American president ever elected. Would you like to answer or do the research?”
It was a tough choice, especially since Kyle didn’t know the answer.
If he did the research, he’d have to go back one space and lose a turn so he could look up the correct answer on one of the tablet computers built into the nearby reading desk.
But while he was researching, Charles might surge ahead. He might even make it all the way to the finish line.
On the other hand, even though Kyle didn’t know the answer, if he said either “fact” or “fiction,” he had a fifty-fifty chance of being right and moving forward six spaces, putting him in front of Charles, and that much closer to victory.
Of course, Kyle also had a fifty-fifty chance of being wrong and adding what might be the final hologram to the wobbly contraption overhead.
“Do the research, Kyle!” urged Akimi.
“Please do,” sneered Charles.
“Yo!” shouted another one of Kyle’s best buds, Miguel Fernandez. “Don’t let Chiltington get under your dome, bro. He’s just playing mind games with you.”
“Impossible.” Charles sniffed. “Keeley doesn’t have a mind for me to play with.”
“Uh, uh, uh,” said Mr. Lemoncello. “Charles, I wonder if, just this once, you might choose kind?” He turned to Kyle. “Well, Mr. Keeley? No one can make this decision for you, unless, of course, you hire a professional decider, but trust me—they are decidedly expensive. Are you willing to put everything on a waffle and take a wild guess?”
Kyle hated losing a turn when the whole idea was to win the game. He hated going backward when the object was to move forward. 
He studied the teetering collection of holograms suspended under the darkened dome. He looked at Charles, who was sneering back at him smugly.
“I want to answer, sir.”
“Very well,” said Mr. Lemoncello. “Let me repeat the question before the cucumbers I had for lunch repeat on me: At five feet four inches, George Washington was the shortest American president ever elected. Fact or fiction?”
Kyle took a deep breath. He remembered some teacher once saying people were shorter back in the olden days. So odds were that Washington was a shrimp.
“That, sir,” he said, “is a . . . fact?”
A buzzer SCRONKed like a sick goose.
“Sorry,” said Mr. Lemoncello. “It is, in fact, fiction. At six feet three inches, George Washington was one of our tallest presidents. It’s time to add another piece to our dangling-dunce-cap-trap contraption.”
Electronic notes diddled up a scale.
“Oh, dear,” said Mr. Lemoncello. “It looks like that’s the last straw!”
A hologram of a striped milk carton straw floated into place. It shot a spitball at a hologram of an old-fashioned cash register, which hit a button, which made the cash drawer pop open with a BING! The drawer smacked a holographic golf ball, which BOINKed down seven steps of a staircase one at a time until it bopped into a row of dominoes, which started to tumble in a curving line. The final domino triggered a catapult, which fired a Ping-Pong ball, which smacked a rooster in the butt. The bird cock-a-doodle-dooed, which startled a tiny man in a striped bathing suit standing on top of a fifty-foot ladder so much that he leapt off, spiraled down, and landed with a splash in a wooden bucket, which, since it was suddenly heavier, pulled a rope that struck a match, which lit a fuse, which ignited a fireworks rocket, which blasted off, which knocked the dunce cap off its hook.
The holographic hat of shame fell and covered Kyle like an upside-down ice cream cone.
“Loser!” crowed Charles.
Everybody else laughed.
By taking a wild guess, Kyle hadn’t gone backward or lost a turn.
But he’d definitely lost the game! 
 
 
 

Reviews

PRAISE FOR THE SERIES:

New York Times bestselling series
 
"Discover the coolest library in the world." —James Patterson
 
"Lots of Action action and quirky humor." —The Washington Post
 
* "A worthy successor to the original madman puzzle-master himself, Willy Wonka." —Booklist, starred review
 
* "A winner for readers and game-players alike." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
 
* "A fun-filled, suspenseful intellectual puzzle." —Shelf Awareness, starred review
 
"Will have readers racing to pick up the next volume." —School Library Journal

Author

© Elena Seibert

When I talk to kids about my new book THE ISLAND OF DR. LIBRIS, I torture them with a tale of electronics deprivation.
     "My main character, Billy Gillfoyle," I say, "is spending the summer in a cabin on a lake.  There is no cable, no TV, no DVR, no X-Box, no PlayStation 3.  There isn't even an old-fashioned VCR."
     By this point, the kids' gasps become audible.
     "On his first day at the cabin," I continue, "Billy drops his iPhone and it shatters.  The nearest Apple store is several hundred miles away."
     Jaws drop.  The kids are practically weeping – just like my hero, Billy Gillfoyle.  He mopes around the cabin after the demise of his iPhone and ends up in this scene with his mother:
    
  "Billy, what do you think kids did back before video games or TV or even electricity?"
  "I don't know.  Cried a lot?"  He plopped down dramatically on the couch.
  "No, Billy. They read books.  They made up stories and games.  They took nothing and turned it into something."
 
     And that's what happens to Billy in this book:  He learns to start using and trusting his own imagination.
     Characters from books that he reads in Dr. Libris' study start coming to life out on the island in the middle of the lake.   In no time, Hercules, the monster Antaeus, Robin Hood, Maid Marian, The Three Musketeers, D'Artagnan, Pollyanna, and Tom Sawyer are all bumping into each other's stories.  It's up to Billy, with the help of his new friend Walter, and a bookcase filled with classic literature, to "imagine" a scenario that will bring all the conflicts to a tidy resolution. 
     Yep.  In THE ISLAND OF DR. LIBRIS, Billy Gillfoyle is learning how to become a writer.  He puts his characters into situations and conflicts that will, ultimately, take him to the happy ending he, and everybody else, is looking for.
     When all seems lost, he is on the island with his new friends Robin Hood, Maid Marian, and Hercules, despairing that he's not heroic enough to rescue his asthmatic friend Walter from the clutches of the evil Space Lizard (yes, hideous creatures from video games and fairy tales eventually come to life on the island, too.) 
 
  "Ho, lads and lassie!" said Robin Hood.  "All is not lost!  Look you, Sir William – I remember a time when Sir Guy of Gisbourne held me captive in his tower.  Did my band of merry followers let a moat or castle walls stand in their way?"
  "Nay!" said Marian.  "Little John and I didst lead the charge.  Oh, how the arrows did fly that day!"
  "I'm not Little John," Billy said quietly.  "Or you, Maid Marian.  I'm not a hero."  He looked down at Walter's inhaler.  "I'm just a kid who can't even save his own family."
  "Nonsense," said Maid Marian. "Each of us can choose who or what we shall be.  We write our own stories, Sir William.  We write them each and every day."
  "And," added Hercules, "if you write it boldly enough, others will write about you, too."
 
     In my book ESCAPE FROM MR. LEMONCELLO'S LIBRARY, I wanted to make young readers excited about reading and doing research.  I tried to turn a trip to the library into an incredibly fun scavenger hunt, filled with puzzles and surprises.  (In my perpetually twelve-years-old mind, that's what doing research actually is.)
     With THE ISLAND OF DR. LIBRIS, I am hoping to excite young readers about the power and awesomeness of their own imaginations. I want them to take nothing and turn it into something.  To take two old ideas, toss them together, and create something new.
     And, when they write their own stories, maybe some of them will decide they want to become authors, writing stories for the rest of us, too!
     
     
 

View titles by Chris Grabenstein