Trip Dinkleman hates to read. Hates, hates, hates it.
All he wants to do is play lacrosse. So when the president of the PTA asks Trip to help her out on his way to tryouts, he is not happy. He is even more not happy when a stack of books tumbles onto his head and knocks him out cold. And he is even more not happy when he wakes up and has absolutely no idea where he is. Now all he wants to do is get home. But after encountering a haunted house, aliens, talking animals, and much, much more, he realizes getting home might be just a little bit harder to do than he thought.
Dan Gutman (b. 1955) is a prolific author of popular children’s books. He began his career with adult nonfiction books about baseball, covering topics such as the game’s greatest scandals and the evolution of its equipment. The birth of his first child inspired him to begin writing for a young audience, beginning with Baseball’s Biggest Bloopers (1993). The Kid Who Ran for President (1996) became Gutman’s bestselling book, and has sold almost a million copies. In 1997, he published Honus & Me, a story about a young boy who finds a rare baseball card that magically takes him back to 1909 to play with the great Honus Wagner. Gutman went on to create a series about time-travel encounters with other baseball stars such as Jackie Robinson and Babe Ruth. Miss Daisy Is Crazy (2004) was the first My Weird School book, beginning a long-running series of more than forty novels. With Mission Unstoppable (2011), Gutman debuted a new adventure series: the Genius Files, starring fraternal twins Coke and Pepsi McDonald. The first book in the series became a New York Times bestseller. The sequel, Never Say Genius, was published in 2012. Gutman lives in New Jersey with his family.