I.R.L.
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A spooky tale of virtual school gone very, very wrong...
Not every kid would be thrilled to move to rural Alaska, but sixth grader Lucy is eager to leave her bullies behind and start over. However, it turns out that Lucy's new school does remote learning from October to April, when the roads become too icy to navigate safely. Being the new kid is hard enough -- how is she going to make friends when she can't meet anyone in person?!
Luckily, the sixth grade class at White Pine Secondary School is tiny (just thirteen students) and they're all super nice and really welcoming. While chatting on zoom, they ask Lucy lots of questions about living in the big city, some of which strike Lucy as a little odd but she just chalks it up to the fact that her new classmates have spent their whole lives in a VERY small town.
As the ice starts to thaw, Lucy grows increasingly excited about meeting her new friends in person! But when she enters the school's address on her phone's GPS, it leads her to a crumbling, clearly abandoned building with a rotted wood sign in front -- a sign that reads White Pine Secondary School.
There's nothing else in sight... except a tiny cemetery with snow-dusted headstones poking out of the frozen ground. Headstones will some very familiar names on them . . .
Lucy doesn’t know what to believe. Are her new “friends” pulling an elaborate prank? Or is truth far, far more horrifying?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Upon first moving from San Francisco to small, rural White Pines, Alaska, due to her mother's occupation studying renewable energy, sixth grader Lucy Bell-Rodriguez is excited to leave her former bullies behind. Yet she's disheartened when she's stuck at home doing remote learning from October to April, waiting out the treacherous Alaskan winter. Now that spring has sprung, though, it's finally time for her first day of in-person schooling; Lucy is eager to get to know her classmates beyond her computer screen. But on her first IRL day at White Pines Secondary School, Lucy arrives to a burned-down building with no one in sight. Convinced she has the wrong address, Lucy tries to find her school again and instead stumbles upon a graveyard with headstones bearing the names of her classmates. Is Lucy the victim of some elaborate prank, or are there supernatural forces at play? Lucy's palpable new-kid anxieties and earnest search for friendship following past bullying and virtual schooling adds emotional depth. Immersive descriptions of the remote Alaskan landscape inject eerie appeal to this sinister paranormal mystery by Goebel (Backcountry). Lucy is described as having "pasty skin." Ages 8–12.
