Joseph Lowery

Rafe Rebellius and the Clash of the Genres Joseph Lowery

Fourteen-year-old Rafe Rabellius really gets into books. Like, literally. And sometimes he can't get out. After being dragged cross-country by his research scientists parents all his life-Greenfort High will be his seventh school when Rafe starts in the fall-there's hope. If Rafe will agree to share his new home with a so-called extended family he's never even heard of (what kind of name is Genrés anyway?), they'll stay put for four whole years. Cool, right? Is a wooden staff shoved under your throat by a short, fully robed and hooded man with caterpillar eyebrows named Whic the Druid Warrior cool? Is it cool to find yourself suddenly in a stagecoach under attack by pseudo-Indians? What about unwittingly rescuing a robot princess from the 29th century who has auto-growing hair with LED glowing tips? Is that cool? Well, yeah. Rafe thinks that's pretty cool. But he's afraid he's not. Struggling to define himself, Rafe is drawn into an urgent battle to save his newfound home and its collection of different genre characters: fantasy, hard-boiled noir, romance, western and more. As Rafe is bounced from book to book, his attempts to help soon backfire and the conflict expands to threaten their varied story worlds as well as his own very real one. Unless Rafe can conquer his lifelong timidity and use his just-discovered abilities to find his own story, it's The End for them all.