Fans of Jerry Spinelli's Maniac Magee and Louis Sachar's Holes will enjoy this story about a boy and the ancient secrets that hide deep in the heart of the Florida everglades near a place called Muck City.When Charlie moves to the small town of Taper, Florida, he discovers a different world. Pinned between the everglades and the swampy banks of Lake Okeechobee, the small town produces sugar cane . . . and the fastest runners in the country. Kids chase muck rabbits in the fields while the cane is being burned and harvested. Dodging flames and blades and breathing smoke, they run down the rabbits for three dollars a skin. And when they can do that, running a football is easy.But there are things in the swamp, roaming the cane at night, that cannot be explained, and they seem connected to sprawling mounds older than the swamps. Together with his step-second cousin "Cotton" Mack, the fastest boy on the muck, Charlie hunts secrets in the glades and on the muck flats where the cane grows secrets as old as the soft earth, secrets that haunted, tripped, and trapped the original native tribes, ensnared conquistadors, and buried runaway slaves. Secrets only the muck knows.From the Hardcover edition.

 

This book has been graded for interest at 13-17 years.

There are 210 pages in this book. This book was published 2014 by Random House Books for Young Readers .

N. D. Wilson lives and writes in the top of a tall, skinny house only one block from where he was born. But his bestselling novels have traveled far and wide, disguising themselves in many strange languages in dozens of distant and mysterious lands. He is the author of ten novels, including Outlaws of Time: The Legend of Sam Miracle, the Ashtown Burials series, and the 100 Cupboards trilogy. He and his wife have five young storytellers of their own, along with an unreasonable number of pets.