Mr. Lemoncello and the Titanium Ticket (Mr. Lemoncello's Library, Band 5) - Hardcover

Grabenstein, Chris

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0525647740 ISBN 13: 9780525647744

Verlag: Random House Books for Young Readers, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

Welcome! For the first time, you are invited INSIDE Mr. Lemoncello's one-of-a-kind Gameworks Factory in book five of the fun-filled, action-packed bestselling series from the much-loved coauthor of the I Funny and Max Einstein series!

Now with a brand-new look packed with shelf and kid appeal!

Far away from his magical library, everyone's favorite game maker, Luigi Lemoncello, is building something new. Something SECRET. And he's about to let the world see it. He'll reveal that hidden deep within the Lemoncello-tastic new building is a single ticket. A titanium ticket.

Four lucky boys and girls are about to win the chance to go inside the building on a spectacular scavenger hunt that will take them through bigger-than-life live-action games--towering, skyscraper-size Jenga; dizzying real-life Chutes and Ladders; death-defying games of Rush Hour; plus ball pit moats and more! Each game will get the players closer to the titanium ticket. But the real secret? Mr. Lemoncello is thinking about his legacy, and whichever player finds the ticket will be the first to win a spot in an elite group of kids who will compete in the next books to win Mr. Lemoncello's ENTIRE EMPIRE!

* "A worthy successor to . . . Willy Wonka." --Booklist, starred review of Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

CHRIS GRABENSTEIN is the New York Times bestselling author of the wildly popular Mr. Lemoncello series, the Welcome to Wonderland series, and many other books, as well as the coauthor of numerous page-turners with James Patterson, including the Max Einstein series, and of Shine!, cowritten with Chris's wife, J.J. Grabenstein. Chris lives in New York City. Visit him at ChrisGrabenstein.com and on Twitter at @CGrabenstein.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

It was after nine o’clock on a school night. 

Simon Skrindle, a short (and nearly invisible) seventh grader at Hudson Hills Middle School, had just crept out of the dark forest near the Lemoncello Gameworks Factory. 

He was a twelve-year-old on a mission. 

He was alone. Simon didn’t have many friends, especially not the kind who’d go on an adventure with him, sneaking through the woods late at night. 

And this was a BIG adventure. 

Simon was going to be the first to see what secrets were hidden inside the new building behind Mr. Lemoncello’s factory! 

For twenty-five years, Luigi L. Lemoncello, the world-famous game maker, had manufactured his games inside the fantastical castle fortress of the Lemoncello Gameworks--a sprawling factory perched high on a hilltop overlooking the Hudson River. Its four corner towers looked like upside-down snow cones made out of lemon-yellow oval bricks. The pinnacles at their pointy tips were topped with cello weather vanes. Sculptures of game pieces served as gargoyles. The factory’s water tower was a one-million-gallon lemon on stilts. During the day, enormous smokestacks puffed out billowy clouds of steam in the shapes of animals or famous faces. Simon loved seeing the Abraham Lincoln and George Washington clouds drifting across the sky over the factory every Presidents’ Day. And the bunnies at Easter time. People came from all over to take selfies with the cartoon clouds. Another pipe let out enormous rainbow-colored bubbles every weekend. 

There was also a giant ball-pit moat surrounding the whole factory and you could only enter when the drawbridge was lowered. Workers had to know the secret password and shout it into an enormous curled horn that looked like something out of a Dr. Seuss book. 

And for the past five years, Mr. Lemoncello had spent a ton of money and time constructing a top-secret new building close to his factory fortress. All the work had been done behind forty-foot-tall plywood walls (painted yellow, of course). The workers and contractors and architects had been sworn to secrecy about what they were doing on the other side of that wooden barricade. 

Rumors buzzed around the town, anyway. 

One guy at school, Jack McClintock, whose dad was the head of security at the Gameworks Factory, said the new building was nothing but a fancy warehouse for “storing junk.” A girl in Simon’s science class, Soraiya Mitchell, whose father was the plant manager, said the new building would be filled with “amazing twenty-second-century game-making technology.” 

Basically, nobody knew what was inside the new building. But everybody wanted to find out. Kids at school were even daring each other to “bust in.” 

No one had the nerve to try. 

Then, two weeks ago, the yellow plywood walls came down to reveal a modern, three-story silver box with mirrored walls. At night, those walls reflected back the twinkling black sky. 

Plywood down, the secret glass building was now surrounded by three rings of chain-link fences, set up in concentric circles. Each fence had a locked gate, which could be reached by following a footpath from the factory parking lot past a bed of yellow and orange flowers spelling out the word “gesundheit,” then on through rows of topiary--evergreen shrubs trimmed to resemble Mr. Lemoncello in various poses (juggling, dancing, tipping an egg timer, balancing a pair of giant dice on his nose). Some kids at school said the fences were electrified, too. 

Security for the new building was tight. Super tight. 

Simon’s grandfather, who hated all things Lemoncello, swore that “the batty old bazillionaire is installing an army of robots in that new building so he can fire all the factory workers!” 

Simon’s grandpa, Sam Skrindle, had no proof for his theory. It was more or less a wild guess. 

That’s all anybody in Hudson Hills had. Wild guesses and theories based on even wilder rumors. 

So Simon decided he would be the first one to actually step foot inside Mr. Lemoncello’s secret new building. He’d show the kids at school. He’d take their dare. He’d also take a few pictures with his phone to prove that he’d done it. 

Besides, Simon had what his grandmother called “an insatiable curiosity.” He loved tearing things apart just to see how they worked. And then he loved putting them back together. 

Usually, he could. 

Except that one time with his grandmother’s blow-dryer. When Simon put it back together, the thing sucked air in instead of blowing it out. It inhaled her hair like a hungry, hungry hippo slurping spaghetti. 

It took a week for the bathroom not to smell like a charred wig. 

Fortunately, his grandmother wasn’t upset. She laughed and said, “Yep, just like your father.”

Simon’s grandparents were some of the few adults in the whole town who had never, ever worked at the Gameworks Factory. Mr. Lemoncello was the main employer in Hudson Hills. Had been for twenty-five years. Everybody said he paid the best wages in the world and had the best benefits, too--medical, dental, free books, a rock climbing wall, two zero-gravity rooms, plus an indoor archery range and a bowling alley. 

Everybody in Hudson Hills loved the zany game maker. 

Everybody except Simon’s grandfather, who said the meanest, nastiest, ugliest things about Mr. Lemoncello--at the grocery store, at the hardware store, at the barbershop, in letters to the local newspaper, even after church on Sundays. 

Sam Skrindle was the town kook. 

Maybe that’s why Simon didn’t have very many friends. 

And why he had to break into the secret building! 

If he did, he’d prove to all the kids at school that not everybody in Hudson Hills named Skrindle was a total joke.

 

2

Simon scurried across the moonlit lawn, past a topiary trimmed to look like Mr. Lemoncello floss dancing, and made it to the pathway, which he followed to the first of the three locked gates. 

There was a small metal box mounted on it. Inside the box, Simon discovered a thumbprint scanner, a video screen, and a keypad. He figured the scanner was for authorized workers. Everybody else probably needed to tap in some kind of security code to open the lock. 

A recorded voice said, “Greetings and salutations!” 

It was Mr. Lemoncello himself! 

Mr. Lemoncello didn’t visit Hudson Hills all that much but Simon recognized his voice from TV commercials and the All-Star Breakout Game on the Kidzapalooza Network. 

“To enter this supersecret zone,” the recorded voice continued, “puzzletastic skills must be shown!” 

A riddle scrolled across the video screen: There are 100 bricks on a plane. One falls off. How many are left? 

Simon thought about that. He wondered if it was a trick question. It couldn’t be this easy. Then he shrugged and tapped 99 on the keypad. 

A flashing Correct! filled the screen and dissolved into animated fireworks. The pixels rearranged themselves to create a new question: What are the three steps for putting an elephant into a refrigerator?

What? Simon thought. He knew Mr. Lemoncello was wacky, but this question was just plain weird.

“It’d have to be a jumbo-sized fridge,” he mumbled. Then he thought out the logical steps. One, open the door. Two, put the elephant in. Three, close the door. It made sense, so he typed those three steps on the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Books for Young Readers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0525647740
• ISBN 13: 9780525647744
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Purmerul LTD; https://strengholt.nl/en/; ; 22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9; Plovdiv; Bulgarien