Hello and welcome to my blog tour post for the
WEIRDO ACADEMY SERIES by Charles Curtis!
I have a Guest Post for you today as well as a giveaway for an Amazon Echo Dot! All of that can be seen below, but first let's learn more about the books in this series...
ACCIDENTAL QUARTERBACK
Author: Charles CurtisSeries: Weirdo Academy #1
Publisher: Tantrum Books/Month9Books
Publication Date: November 7, 2017
Summary:
Alexander Graham Ptuiac, the son of an inventor, dreams of playing football. But his dreams are thwarted by his lack of athleticism and overall lanky build. Like any kid with a dream, Alex tries out anyway, just in case. If nothing else, maybe he can win the role of water boy. So when Alex suddenly manifests superhuman powers during football tryouts, Alex can’t believe his good luck. He’s got game! But his new abilities can get him kicked off the team; unless Alex can keep it a secret long enough to find out how the heck he got this way. Enter Dex, a diminutive classmate who can somehow jump as high as ten feet in the air. Now, Alex isn’t the only one at school with a secret. Except, the boys have caught the attention of some pretty nefarious adults, intent on making sure neither Alex nor Dex make it through the season.The only thing stranger than Alexander Graham Ptuiac, accidental quarterback, is the shocking truth about himself and his parents. When truth is stranger than fiction and adults are out to get you, there’s only one thing to do. Play ball!
Author: Charles Curtis
Series: Weirdo Academy #2
Publisher: Tantrum Books/Month9Books
Publication Date: November 7, 2017
Summary:
Alex and Dex are local heroes. Suddenly, everyone wants to be friends with Alex, Dex and Sophi.But someone more powerful than any of them lurks in the background, keeping a close watch until it’s time to swoop in and capture them. Still, Alex tries to maintain some semblance of normalcy — in the offseason, he wants to play baseball. As Alex becomes a formidable pitcher, his powers grow and so does his obsession with controlling them.
With Alex finding less and less time for Dex and Sophi, Dex discovers his cat-like abilities start to disappear soon after he starts spending time with a girl.
As the friends struggle to maintain their friendships, that mysterious someone gets closer and closer. Can the three friends find their way back to one another before it’s too late? Or will middle school tear them apart for good?
The world of … (World Building)
Weirdo Academy is all about kids with super powers right out of a comic book. But I knew when I wrote it that I wanted everything else about the middle grade series to be as real as possible.
Beyond those superhuman abilities, both The Accidental Quarterback and The Impossible Pitcher are set in the world we live in today. There’s no dystopian near-future or alternate reality. In fact, I based the town the kids live in on a suburb of New York City (I grew up in Manhattan … “write what you know,” right?), although I never named the actual location in the books, hoping that readers would project their vision of a familiar town on to it. The location is also an homage of sorts to X-Men, my all-time favorite comic book series. The X-Mansion, home to the mutant superheroes, is located in “Salem Center,” outside of New York City.
One of my favorite scenes in Quarterback takes place in a touristy center of the city filled with countless bright animated billboards. If it sounds like Times Square, you’d be right. In that same chapter, two of our heroes visit a part of the city filled with art galleries, which might be New York’s SoHo but could also be the Old City district of Philadelphia (again, no coincidence that I went to college outside Philly). The middle school is a high-priced private institution, and hopefully the football scenes conjure up a bit of Friday Night Lights.
The point of all this was to give young readers a feeling that this could all actually happen right now – although I love dystopian universes, science fiction and fantasy, I found it more fun to imagine kids with powers right under our noses in the 2010s. Frankly, it was also easier putting them into places I knew and could describe in vivid detail rather than spending a lot more time building an entirely new world.
Although you now know the basis for some of the surroundings in the Weirdo Academy series, the hope is that you’ll still feel like there’s something familiar about them … and that maybe it’s not too crazy to imagine superheroes there.
Charles Curtis a sportswriter for USA Today’s For The Win. He has reported and written for other publications including ESPN The Magazine, ESPN.com, Bleacher Report, NJ.com, TV Guide and Entertainment Weekly. He lives in New York City with his wife and son.
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One (1) winner will receive an Echo Dot
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