Twelve-year-old Rob has stuffed his closet with old laboratory experiments, unread books, and more, and when a creature emerges from that chaos causing a great deal of trouble, Rob has to do such horrible things as visit a library and speak at a school assembly to set things right again.

Twelve-year-old Rob has stuffed his closet with old laboratory experiments, unread books, and more, and when a creature emerges from that chaos causing a great deal of trouble, Rob has to do such horrible things as visit a library and speak at a school assembly to set things right again.

Twelve-year-old underachiever Rob has better things to do than read. His parents give him lots of books but most of them just end up in the messy pile of junk he keeps locked in his closet that once doubled as a makeshift science laboratory. One day, Rob hears weird sounds coming from behind his closet door and discovers a funny little creature that seems to be a cross between two characters from books he's tried to ignore. He names him Wonkenstein. Keeping track of "Wonk" is hard work. But with help from friends and a little off-the-wall magic, Rob and Wonkenstein's crazy adventures set the stage for great laughs . . . and Rob might even read some good books along the way.

The latest creature to emerge from Rob's closet is a cross between Chewbacca from Star Wars and Harry Potter. Rob names him "Potterwookiee" ("Hairy" for short) and soon Rob finds himself treading water as he tries to figure out how to care for his mixed-up friend. Great laughs and great books help Rob along the way.

Things are going pretty well for Rob Burnside until Pinocula--a cross between Pinocchio and a vampire--emerges from his closet, lying, joking, and doing his best to drive Rob crazy.

Rob Burnside thinks he's getting the hang of things. It almost seems as if he has learned all he needed to from his unusual closet. Beardy, the doorknob, has it locked up and there are no signs nor sounds of the closet door opening again. But something has slipped from the closet unnoticed and that something is part Gollum, part Cat in the Hat. He's an intense creature with mad rhyming skills. And when Rob's family wins a trip to Colorado, something extra makes it into his luggage. Get ready for school fights, train rides, long mysterious hikes, and a creature unlike any of the others. What Rob will discover is epic.

After a slight misunderstanding involving a horrible governess, oatmeal, and a jar of tadpoles, siblings Tobias and Charlotte Eggars find themselves abandoned by their father at the gates of a creepy reform school. Evil mysteries are afoot at Witherwood, where the grounds are patrolled by vicious creatures after dark and kids are locked in their rooms. Charlotte and Tobias soon realize that they are in terrible danger—especially because the head of Witherwood has perfected the art of mind control. If only their amnesiac father would recover and remember that he has two missing children. If only Tobias and Charlotte could solve the dark mystery and free the kids at Witherwood—and ultimately save themselves.

"A strange combination of Ebenezer Scrooge and Lego Batman helps Rob Burnside save his school"--

"During Softrock Middle School's Fun-ger Games, Rob Burnside hopes that Katfish, a cross between Katniss and the Little Mermaid created in his closet, will help with game tips, advice about girls, and getting people to stop hating him."--Publisher.

Winner of the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Long-listed for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice A Slate Top Ten Book of the Year A TIME Best Fiction Book of 2022 Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, NPR, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Financial Times, San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Buzzfeed, and more. A magnificent, beguiling tale winding from the postwar rural provinces to Paris, from an English boarding school to the quiet Pennsylvania home where a woman can live without her past, The Book of Goose is a story of disturbing intimacy and obsession, of exploitation and strength of will, by the celebrated author Yiyun Li. Fabienne is dead. Her childhood best friend, Agnès, receives the news in America, far from the French countryside where the two girls were raised—the place that Fabienne helped Agnès escape ten years ago. Now Agnès is free to tell her story. As children in a war-ravaged backwater town, they’d built a private world, invisible to everyone but themselves—until Fabienne hatched the plan that would change everything, launching Agnès on an epic trajectory through fame, fortune, and terrible loss.