Ginger must save her high-tech hometown from robots gone rogue in this "quirky, dryly funny" (Booklist) science fiction novel from National Book Award-winning author Pete Hautman.

Welcome to Flinkwater, Iowa, home of the largest manufacturer of Articulated Computerized Peripheral Devices in the world. If you own a robot, it probably came from Flinkwater.

Meet Ginger Crump, the plucky, precocious (and somewhat sarcastic) genius who finds herself in the middle of a national emergency when Flinkwater's computers start turning people into vegetables. Mental vegetables, that is. In Ginger's words, they've been "bonked."

When Ginger's father is bonked, she recruits her self-declared future husband, boy genius Billy George, to help her find the source of the bonkings. Soon they're up against a talking dog, a sasquatch, and a zombie, while Flinkwater is invaded by an army of black SUVs led by the witless-but-dangerous Agent Ffelps from Homeland Security. Can Ginger get to the bottom of the bonkings, or will computer chaos reign forever?

 

This book has been graded for interest at 9-13 years.

There are 256 pages in this book. This book was published 2015 by Simon & Schuster .

Pete Hautman won the National Book Award for his novel Godless. He is also the author of the acclaimed novels The Big Crunch, How to Steal a Car, Rash, Invisible, Sweetblood, Hole in the Sky, No Limit, and Mr. Was. His home in the world is Minnesota, and his home on the web is www. petehautman. com.