Today, we feature a sneak peek of C. Lee McKenzie’s middle grade adventure fantasy, Alligators Overhead.
Alligators, witches and spooky mansions aren’t your average neighbors unless you live in the Ornofree swamp in the backwater town of Hadleyville. The town’s bad boy, Pete Riley, may only be twelve, but he’s up to his eyeballs in trouble. The trouble arrives when a legendary hundred-year-old mansion materializes next door and the Ornofree alligators declare war to save their swamp from bulldozers. Then Pete’s guardian aunt and her friends vanish trying to restore order using outdated witchcraft. Pete must find the witches and stop the war. He might succeed if his one friend, Weasel, sticks with him.
Alligators Overhead is available through Amazon.com, Amazon UK, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords and other online stores.
Here is an excerpt from Alligators Overhead:
Something just a little suspicious-odd happened last week near Egret Lane. And when the Wartgob sisters told Clara Frankenhoff, Clara told Margo Stiltencranz, the meter maid, who passed it on to Lucy Thricewater at the gift shop, but word never reached Lizzy Glopp (spelled with two P’s) because she was having coffee with her friend, Gladys Neep. By the time the story had traveled the Hadleyville Whisper Circle, it wasn’t news anymore, and planning Gladys Neep’s birthday party was, so everybody forgot that suspicious-odd thing.
Too bad.
If Lizzy Glopp had heard about the sightings over the Ornofree Swamp, the suspicious-odd shapes almost like —maybe exactly like— alligators she would have known there was something brewing. She might have kept a better eye on that twelve-year-old rascal of a nephew of hers, maybe she would have warned him about just how much trouble was headed their way. But Pete had so many problems, an alligators-overhead-sighting would have had to take a ticket and stood in line for his attention.
Principal Pitt had suspended him for two days for that snake caper, and then two more days because of what happened to Lucy Burke. True, somebody locked Lucy in the janitor’s closet, but he didn’t do it. All Pete did was wish it would happen, and it happened. That kept him scratching his head. Well, to be honest, it had him downright “nervous-scared.” That was how Lizzy Glopp would describe her nephew’s condition.
Pete didn’t like that nervous-scared bundle of stuff tumbling around inside him. Not one bit. So he’d devised a good system to avoid those feelings. When he was busy hatching his pranks, and then escaping blame he didn’t have time for the nervous-scared stuff. He almost forgot how much he missed his “real” home. He almost felt normal again. The problem was his good system got him into bad trouble.
All. The. Time.
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Good luck CL! *laughing* Now I know who the mysterious alligator is on my Facebook wall every now and then. I had forgotten about your book! 🙂
Hi Glynis. I saw you were upset about the alligator posts on fb, so I unfriended you to keep from pestering you. I never got around to emailing you and explaining. Sorry.