Wretched Waterpark
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
A middle-grade mystery series that's spooky, creepy, and filled with gothic twists! Meet the Sinister-Winterbottom twins, who solve mysteries at increasingly bizarre summer vacation destinations in the hopes of being reunited with their parents—or at the very least finally finding a good churro.
“An absolute delight. If I have to die in a waterpark, I want to die in this one.”—Holly Black, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Cruel Prince
"Wickedly weird. . . . Will appeal to anyone who loved A Series of Unfortunate Events." —The New York Times
Meet the Sinister-Winterbottoms: brave Theo, her timid twin, Alexander, and their older sister, Wil. They’re stuck for the summer with their Aunt Saffronia, who doesn’t know how often children need to eat and can’t use a smartphone, and whose feet never quite seem to touch the floor when she glides—er—walks.
When Aunt Saffronia suggests a week pass to the Fathoms of Fun Waterpark, they hastily agree. But the park is even stranger than Aunt Saffronia. The waterslides look like gray gargoyle tongues. The employees wear creepy black dresses and deliver ominous messages. An impossible figure is at the top of the slide tower, people are disappearing, and suspicious goo is seeping into the wave pool.
Something mysterious is happening at Fathoms of Fun, and it’s up to the twins to get to the bottom of it. The mystery, that is. NOT the wave pool. Definitely NOT the wave pool. But are Theo and Alexander out of their depth?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Twelve-year-old twins Theodora and Alexander Sinister-Winterbottom, and their 16-year-old sister Wilhelmina, encounter the summer-vacation unexpected via White's (the Camelot Rising trilogy) archly told, gleefully macabre series opener. In the middle of a night marked by "urgency and candles," the siblings are transported to a mysterious home to stay with equally mysterious maternal aunt, Saffronia Sinister, who "by all appearances, had never encountered an actual human child before." Telling them to "find what was lost," she drops them off at the Victorian-flavored, unusually grim Fathoms of Fun Waterpark, which features a slide named Oblivion and a wave pool called Cold, Unknowable Sea. Owned by dour Mrs. Widow, the amusement park thrills adrenaline fanatic Theo and unnerves cautious Alexander as they wander the grounds under Wil's nominal supervision, avoiding the lone eatery's mince pie and seeking the recently disappeared Mr. Widow. The caper moves briskly toward a tidy end, popping with witty dialogue and gothic puns, and pitting the twins, their technologically distracted sister, and a newfound ally against avaricious forces while hinting at larger series mysteries around the siblings' parents and collective memories. Alexander and Theo are white; Wil has brown skin. Ages 8–12.
