Bella Delafleur Atom-Smasher Wilkins($10.99Value)

Description

Never, ever build a suspicious high-tech device based on design schematics sent from an unknown source. More often than not, you’ll only end up f*cking up reality. Fifteen-year-old Bella Delafleur Wilkins is experiencing a wee bit of a tiny hint of a slight sliver of a conundrum. You see, she built a mysterious device of unknown purpose and origin. She traveled into the high mountain desert to test it out. She activated the device, and it did nothing. Yet now, back at home, she’s just discovered that reality as she remembers it is radically different from reality as it currently exists. For starters, her parents’ situation has taken a rather unexpected turn. A misunderstanding with her best friend Amy threatens their friendship. Out of nowhere she’s experiencing recurring migraines, which pales in comparison to her sudden popularity at school. And if all this wasn’t horrible enough already, her phone can’t charge or pick up a signal. Oh, and apparently she’s now part of the drama club. Have things always been this way, or has Bella’s grip on reality finally soiled itself? After a series of increasingly absurd and bewildering events, Bella comes to accept that her brain has turned into spinach quiche and that everything she’s ever believed over the past ten years has been a delusion. Naturally, she then encounters two individuals whose own unusual circumstances suggest that the device she built might be at the root of her skewed reality after all—it’s just too bad she lost the damn thing. With a backpack on her shoulders, a phone battery at nineteen percent, and an irreverent worldview that would make nuns and sailors alike blush, Bella Delafleur Wilkins and her two new companions embark on a gentle romp through bootstrap paradoxes, high school hallways, a physics-defying energy vortex, several hospital rooms, a void in the multiverse, and at least one self-serve coffee shop. Come join them—it’s better than stubbing a toe. “This is by far the best darkly humorous, YA-adjacent, absurdly comical science-fiction book I’ll ever write with the words Bella Delafleur Atom-Smasher Wilkins in its title.” —David M.N. Singler, author of Bella Delafleur Atom-Smasher Wilkins