Oh! Oh! My friend Peggy Dillner just told me that MT Anderson - whose THE ASTONISHING LIFE OF OCTAVIAN NOTHING, TRAITOR TO THE NATION, VOL. 1: THE POX PARTY was just named a National Book Award winner (though gosh, I really was pulling for Nancy Werlin's THE RULES OF SURVIVAL, which was so exquisitely wrought that it was literally painful to read) -

ANYWAY.

Apparently Tobin has a book coming out about DELAWARE! Peggy was kind enough to send me the following excerpt:

It is a land of wonders; it is a land of mysery; it is a land that time forgot - or chose specifically not to remember. It is called DELAWARE.

Cut off from the civilized world for untold years by prohibitive interstate tolls at the New Jersey border, Delaware is nothing but a name to most of us, a place impossibly strange and exotic, a land of monasteries wreathed in mist, steaming jungles where vines embrace the stone heads of fallen gods; it is a coast of golden bays where simple fisherfolk mend their nets while overhead pterodactyls flap home in the evenings' afterglow.

It is into the heart of this forbidden realm--possibly the most thrilling and unusual of the mid-Atlantic states--that Jasper Dash, Boy Technonaut, and his friends Lily Gefelty and Katee Mulligan must travel to unravel a terrible mystery. Their journey will take them from the floor of their school gym, in the midst of an intramural stare-eyes competititon, to the far reaches of the imagination. So sit back, readers! Let your hands clench, your jaw go slack, and your forehead break out in hives as you read the tale of JASPER DASH AND THE FLAME-PITS OF DELAWARE.


I seriously cannot wait for this book.