A storybook series · Grades 6 to 8
The Impossible Next Door
Something impossible happens in an ordinary neighbourhood, and you and four friends find out how it really works.
1 book
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Book 1: The Rumour That Knew Tomorrow · Grades 6 to 8
The community hall smells like hot glue and toast, which is how it always smells on maker day. Today there is also a dragon in it.
It fills the front of the room. Its body runs the whole length of the stage, scale after scale of orange and coral paper, and its two wings rise behind it like sails. Getting it through the hall doors took all five of you, two neighbours, and a long argument about whether doors really need frames. Each wing is fixed to the dragon's back with two metal clips the size of your thumb. You know, because on Thursday night you held each wing steady while Theo fitted the clips, and then spent the rest of the night painting the scales on its tail.
"Two hundred and twelve," says their Pet, hovering at your shoulder. "I counted them twice. I would like it on record that one of them is upside down."
"It's not upside down," says Theo from somewhere underneath the left wing. "It's expressive."
He's lying on his back on the platform with a screwdriver, tightening a clip that does not need tightening. That's what Theo does when he's nervous: he finds the nearest thing that can be adjusted, and he adjusts it. The dragon was his idea. The clips were his design. If the wings come off in front of two hundred people, everyone in this hall will know whose fault it was, and Theo knows it too.
Across the room, Priya is pinning the day's program to the corkboard with the focus of a surgeon. She taps one line with her finger.
"Dragon to the parade float, twelve thirty," she reads out, to nobody in particular. "Not twelve. Not twelve fifteen. Twelve thirty. I pinned this up yesterday at three forty-five, and it's the only thing in this building running on time."
Mina doesn't look up. She's on a stool by the side window with her sketchbook on her knee, drawing the dragon's snout in quick, sure lines. From there she can see along the dragon's whole back. When Priya leans over to see, Mina turns the page.
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Books in this series
- Book 1: The Rumour That Knew Tomorrow · Grades 6 to 8 · English
Meet the world
Maple Street, Birch Street, Crow Lane, Elm Road and the community hall: a modern neighbourhood where something keeps seeming impossible. A prediction seems to come true before your eyes.
You choose a lead, collect a clue, and direct your Pet to bring a test to life. Every case has a complete answer that a reader can work out from what the book shows, and each one can be read on its own.
Who is in it
- Priya, 13: sees quantities, patterns and competing explanations, and can sound more certain than the evidence allows.
- Theo, 13: loves mechanisms, making and testing, and sometimes falls for an elaborate explanation.
- Mina, 14: notices space, pictures and small inconsistencies, and decides for herself how her unfinished work is shared.
- Jules, 13: hears wording and what people mean by it, likes to entertain, and sometimes repeats a story too quickly.
- Your Pet: performs models, organizes the evidence, asks useful questions and joins the jokes.
For grown-ups
What the series practises
- Telling what a source says from what someone retold
- Testing an explanation by changing one thing
- Weighing evidence before deciding, and repairing a mistake with a friend
- Each book lists the sources behind its facts, and says what is fiction
Ways to do it
- On their own, with their Pet
- With a grown-up beside them
- With someone far away, on a call
Each book's page says what it practises and where its facts come from: