The Adventures of Casey, Kendall and the Stucco Beings

Say you’ve discovered that the stucco wall outside your school is actually a Colony of Tiny Beings—thousands of them, clinging fiercely to their perpendicular Home World, terrified that you might scrape them off with your Hall Pass. And that every walk to school is actually The Game, with elaborate rules about Shielding, Elevating, and Descending that determine whether passing cars run you over. And that the library books are conspiring to hide from you the one book that gives you access to your Secret World. Not only that, but the Stucco Being Chief has assembled a Spy Team to monitor your every move, complete with a Scorekeeper and a Grand Scoreboard tracking points you didn’t even know you were losing.This is everyday life for Casey—a kid whose imagination transforms the ordinary into the epic, the boring into the urgent, and the lonely into the populated. Casey’s world is full of Private Secret Games (which you tell Nobody about), Shared Secret Games (which you only play with certain friends), and an ever-present Other Voice that offers commentary, critique, and the occasional “Woof! Woof!”Then Kendall arrives. The new kid. The one who looks straight through you and asks questions like: “Why do you keep making yourself ‘gotta do’ things you don’t really ‘gotta’ do?””I would really like to tell you the answer to that,” Casey thinks, “but I don’t quite know how to explain it.””You don’t actually have to answer that,” Kendall says, as if mind-reading. “You probably don’t quite know how to explain it, anyway.”What follows is a story about friendship, imagination, and the Important Stuff that Nobody Else paye attention to —warm, funny, and genuinely philosophical. For readers who loved The Phantom Tollbooth, Bridge to Terabithia, or A Series of Unfortunate Events (with a healthy dose of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe) this is a book about kids who think and feel differently, and the friends who finally get it.(Ages 8–12 … and for grown-ups who remember having Secret Games)ABOUT THE AUTHORZemo Trevathan writes for kids who see more than what’s there. The Adventures of Casey, Kendall & The Stucco Beings is his first children’s novel—a love letter to our interior worlds, the ways none of us really fit in, and the friends we finally do fit in with. Zemo also coaches and writes books for business leaders, but those are on a totally different shelf, and have no Stucco Beings in them. .