Today we’re spotlighting Shock The Monkey by Neal Shusterman and Eric Elfman!
Read on for more about the authors and the book!
About the Author: Neal Shusterman
Neal Shusterman is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of over thirty books, including I Am the Walrus; Challenger Deep, which won the National Book Award; Scythe, a Michael L. Printz Honor Book; Dry, which he cowrote with his son, Jarrod Shusterman; and Unwind, which won more than thirty domestic and international awards. He invites you to visit him online at storyman.com.
About the Author: Eric Elfman
Eric Elfman is a screenwriter and the author of several books for children and young adults, including I Am the Walrus; The Very Scary Almanac and Almanac of the Gross, Disgusting & Totally Repulsive (an ALA Recommended Book for Reluctant Readers); and coauthor of the popular Tesla’s Attic trilogy. He invites you to visit him on Twitter @Eric_Elfman.
About the Book: Shock The Monkey
Noah Prime must set out to save his friends and the universe once again in this jaw-dropping sequel to the New York Times bestselling novel, I Am the Walrus.
Noah Prime never expected to wind up a fugitive hunted by aliens.
To be honest, he had never even believed in aliens…until a team of them blew up his house. He escaped—and managed to save the world—by using his mysterious ability to harness the traits of every animal on earth. Now he’s in hiding, and thinks all is well.…
…Until his friend Ogden buys a star for Claire, the most popular girl in school. However, instead of a quaint romantic notion, it turns out to be an actual real estate deal—and aliens from that star system abduct Claire to take her to the nasty, trash-filled planet she now owns.
It’s up to Noah, Sahara, and Ogden to cross the cosmos in search of Claire to save her and her strange new world from the evilest body-snatching worms in the galaxy. This time it’s going to take a lot more than walrus blubber, cheetah speed, or skunk funk to save the day…it’s going to take friendship of the most extraordinary and extraterrestrial variety.
Critically acclaimed authors Neal Shusterman and Eric Elfman are back with an action-packed, laugh-out-loud sequel to the New York Times bestselling novel I Am the Walrus, perfect for fans of Eoin Colfer and Rick Riordan.
~Excerpt~
Chapter 1
With Claws Like That . . .
The creature was clearly not of Earth. It did not even bear the slightest resemblance to anything that had ever legally been on this planet.
Wherever it was from, it was obviously an apex predator. Even its teeth had teeth.
“Can’t you go any faster?” asked Andi, clinging to Noah’s back as he raced through the Latvian forest to escape the hellish creature.
“Maybe if you weren’t so heavy.”
“Oh, so now it’s my fault?”
Noah was pushing himself as hard as he could. He had employed cheetah-speed and tried to use horseshoe bat echolocation to anticipate trees, boulders, and other obstacles in their path—but using two complex animal traits simultaneously? Impossible! It was like trying to do math while someone was shouting random numbers at you. He could do them one after the other, but not simultaneously—so they ended up bouncing off a tree, taking critical seconds away. The neon-blue monstrosity was almost on them now.
“Slime trail!” shouted Andi.
“I tried that already!” Noah shouted back. “Twice! I slopped our trail with hagfish slime, then snail slime, and it didn’t even stumble!”
The creature’s scales, each with its own miniature mouth, screeched as the creature galloped toward them. Although “galloped” wasn’t quite the right word for a thing with five legs. “Gallolloped” was more like it. The rhythm of its hooves cut a five-beat cadence that just felt wrong on so many levels.
“You’re the brainiac!” Noah yelled to his sister. “Think of something!”
“I’m not a miracle worker!” shouted Andi. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a product of science, not a magical being.”
Andi was, as her name suggested, an android. Not the phone, but an actual android, although she was also a phone, but that was a very small part of her functionality. Most of the time she was in humanoid form, indistinguishable from an actual human. But once in a while, she was a
suitcase.
She had already tried all her countermeasures against the monstrosity closing in on them, from dark-energy quantum lasers to self-doubt torpedoes. But nothing had worked.
“Fractillian Abysmal Beasts are extremely difficult to discourage once they get their mind set on something.”
“Is that what it is?”
“Duh— isn’t it obvious?”
Noah leaped into a tree with gibbon agility to clear an unexpected bog— but the Fractillian Abysmal Beast stomped right through the bog as if it weren’t there.
“Maybe,” said Andi, “we should find out what it wants.”
“It wants to eat us!”
“Not us,” reminded Andi. “You. My metallic alloys are not digestible to it. But that aside, we’re not certain it does want to eat you.”
“Are you kidding me? Look at it!”
“All that drool discharging from its primary mouth does not necessarily indicate hunger. Fractillian Abysmal Beasts tend to have issues with saliva overproduction.”
Noah dropped back down to the forest floor and called up cheetah-speed again. While he had still not mastered all the defense mechanisms of the million-plus species held within his DNA, there were several hundred he could summon at a moment’s notice— if not simultaneously, then at least one after another. For instance, he could go all poison dart frog on the monster, forcing his skin to secrete a deadly neurotoxin— but there was no guarantee it would work. And even if it did, the thing wouldn’t die until after it had eaten Noah, so that was a nonstarter.
Had Noah been able to effectively echolocate while also running like a cheetah, he would have known about the granite face of a mountain in front of them before it could be seen. And although Andi’s radar did catch it, she couldn’t communicate the threat in time.
Noah hit the mountain face at nearly sixty miles an hour. That would have killed a normal human, but his body responded like a tardigrade— a microscopic creature that could survive bullet-speed impact. Of course, that didn’t stop it from hurting.
But he didn’t have time to yowl. He swallowed the pain of his near splat and, realizing he had to climb the sheer cliff, called up some gecko. Gecko was easy— it was, in fact, one of his favorite traits. His fingers spatulated, and he began to scale the rock wall, but just a few feet off the
ground, he realized his critical error.
Shoes.
To successfully gecko, he needed all ten fingers and all ten toes to climb. Quickly, he kicked his shoes off and tried again, but to no avail.
Because he was also wearing socks.
How pathetic to have survived an entire alien conspiracy trying to kill him, only to be defeated by a stupid pair of socks. The irony that they were from “Target” was not lost on him.
Title: SHOCK THE MONKEY
Author: Neal Shusterman and Eric Elfman
Release Date: May 7, 2024
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Genre: Middle Grade Action / Adventure
Age Range: 8-12
