The story of Dead Fred, Flying Lunchboxes and the Good Luck Circle was born from real-life Laura McKinney’s imaginative adventures on more than one thousand walks to school. Over the last seven years she has never been driven to school.

With her friends and her father, author Frank McKinney, she walks from their historic 75-year old beach cottage through a dense grove of trees, past a eerie nature preserve, and over a rickety drawbridge on the Intracoastal Waterway, on the one-mile path to school every single school day of her life.

Every child would love to walk to school if they could. Let Ppeekk, all her friends, Dead Fred and the evil Megalodon take you on this fantastical journey...

...When twelve-year-old Ppeekk (pronounced "Peekie”) Rose Berry moves from rural Indiana to sunny south Florida, she is forced to walk to school on her first day.

So what if her aloof father walks behind her? As an only child, she’s used to boring adults, or “coprolites” as she privately calls them.

Her walk turns into an eagerly anticipated ritual---rain, shine or hurricane.

Early in the school year, her favorite sandy path is being paved over with concrete. But hanging off the back of the concrete truck is a little old man no bigger than she is. He’s puffing on a pipe and, if the character on the Lucky Charms cereal box had a grandfather, the little man would be him.

As he climbs into the truck to drive away, he smiles and blows a smoke ring toward  Ppeekk. This smoke ring sparkles like a wreath of diamonds before it vanishes.

When she looks again, the truck and the little man are gone but there at her feet is a strange petrified twig. She picks up the twig and draws a sweeping circle in the wet cement, trying to recall the brilliance of the smoke ring. She scribbles her name in the circle, too.

The next day, after tossing a water balloon into what becomes the Good Luck Circle and then dancing inside, everything changes.

On the drawbridge over the Intracoastal Waterway, she finds a very small, very flat, very dead fish. When he comes to life in her hand, he has an amazing story to tell.

In the brilliant underwater world of High Voltage, manatees talk, starfish are the gate keepers, and practical-joking clownfish encourage children to launch their lunchboxes off the bridge.

Now the fiendish Megalodon, a fifty-foot prehistoric shark, has laid siege to High Voltage and dethroned King Frederick the Ninth (whom Ppeekk calls “Dead Fred”). The monster reigns amphibiously under the old drawbridge with his army of crabs and blood-red remora fish, whose suckers drain victims’ joy and imagination.

Worse yet, the same forces threatening the water are now seeping out, destroying the happiness, the sense of wonder, and the imaginations of their schoolmates, teachers, and families.

Ppeekk hides Dead Fred in the only safe place she can think of: the usher’s coat room at church. As she grows to know Fred, she learns to trust and love him. Unlike her parents, he listens to her and counsels her. Dead Fred trusts Ppeekk, too. In fact, he has a BIG favor to ask. Can she help him save High Voltage and the coveted Eternal Life Circle from the evil Magalodon?

Ppeekk and her friends use everything they’ve got to lure the evil Megalodon to his demise—exploding coconut bombs, strangler fig lassos, even themselves as human bait—to vanquish the beast and his rogue army.

In the climactic scene, they fight the battle of their lives in a Category-5 hurricane . . . Will they be able to save Dead Fred and High Voltage? Will they protect the life force represented by the Eternal Life Circle?

Will Bridget the nasty, cigar chomping bridgekeeper raise the mountainous drawbridge to keep her away from High Voltage, or lower it and allow her to pass?

Can she, sweet and gentle Ppeekk Rose Berry, who has never done anything overly adventurous, summon the courage to descend into this underwater world? Can she and her friends, rambunctious Mini Romey, brainy Quatro, Firecracker, Little Feet, G.J., Frizz, Mcflyo, Danimal do what Dead Fred needs her to do? 

Read Dead Fred, Flying Lunchboxes & The Good Luck Circle to find out!