Flip Book

If you could become anyone in the world...who would you be?

For Ryan and Taylor McKenzie the answer is simple: anyone but me!

Eighth-graders Taylor and Ryan are twins. But that's where the similarities end.

Ryan never met a test he couldn't fail. Give him a foot, he'll take an inch. Given half a chance, there isn't anything he won't screw up. According to his teachers and parents, Ryan is the Big Disappointment.

Taylor, on the other hand, always turns in her homework on time. She's the perfect student. Her idea of fun is reading entries from the encyclopedia or planning long trips to the museum.

But lately Taylor and Ryan share at least one thing in common: nothing seems to be working out as they planned. It's like the rules have changed, and nobody told them what the new rules are. No matter who you are, everyone wants you to be someone else.

But who?

They may have found an answer: mysterious disks that magically allow them to transform - to "flip" - into legendary figures from the past. Hercules. Cleopatra. Amelia Earhart. Einstein. The possibilities are endless!

Who knew being a hero could be so easy!

But as Ryan and Taylor will discover, it's being yourself that is really hard.

Publishers Weekly

The Nexulans are intergalactic content creators, the Hollywood moguls of the universe. One of their most popular products is a series of small discs that, when activated, allow the user to "experience great moments in the life of a legend" in Earth's history. When a Nexulan ship crashes, some of the discs land near a middle school-where twin eighth-graders Ryan and Taylor McKenzie discover them. Ready-for-anything Ryan jumps at the chance to use the discs, while his straight-laced, A+-average sister wants to turn them over to the authorities. Ryan is the first to figure out how they work: after a quick flip, he absorbs the disc into his palm, and he literally becomes the hero whose life it chronicles. Suddenly the boy who was last in sports, failing in school and a constant disappointment to his parents finds himself in the minds of such historic figures as Babe Ruth, Einstein and Gandhi. Lubar's prose may not be as lean here as in Dunk, but the extremely short chapters and cinematic point-of-view shifts keep the pages flipping quickly. The author makes both main characters equally compelling: Taylor excels at everything, but has deep sympathy for her brother's weaknesses; Ryan is all too aware of those weaknesses and wrestles with how to overcome them. Thus a spaceship dropping magical artifacts to Earth becomes secondary to a complex, believable character study. A savvy drug metaphor also lies beneath it all: Ryan's near-reliance on the reality-escaping discs (he even fashions rules that will ring familiar to addicts of all stripes-never too early in the morning, never before a big test, etc.) is narrowly trumped by the redeeming insight that he doesn't need them to be someone who matters. A multi-level tale, well told. Ages 9-12. (July) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.