Mr. Lemoncello's Great Library Race Read online

  Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library

  Mr. Lemoncello’s Library Olympics

  The Island of Dr. Libris

  Welcome to Wonderland: Home Sweet Motel

  Welcome to Wonderland: Beach Party Surf Monkey

  THE HAUNTED MYSTERY SERIES

  The Crossroads

  The Demons’ Door

  The Zombie Awakening

  The Black Heart Crypt

  COAUTHORED WITH JAMES PATTERSON

  Daniel X: Armageddon

  Daniel X: Lights Out

  House of Robots

  House of Robots: Robots Go Wild!

  House of Robots: Robot Revolution

  I Funny

  I Even Funnier

  I Totally Funniest

  I Funny TV

  I Funny School of Laughs

  Jacky Ha-Ha

  Pottymouth and Stoopid

  Treasure Hunters

  Treasure Hunters: Danger Down the Nile

  Treasure Hunters: Secret of the Forbidden City

  Treasure Hunters: Peril at the Top of the World

  Word of Mouse

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Chris Grabenstein

  Cover art copyright © 2017 by Gilbert Ford

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! rhcbooks.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Grabenstein, Chris, author.

  Title: Mr. Lemoncello’s great library race / Chris Grabenstein.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Random House, [2017] | Sequel to: Mr. Lemoncello’s Library Olympics. | Summary: “Mr. Lemoncello holds a contest for his young friends where they must bring interesting facts back to his library”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015040525 | ISBN 9780553536065 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780553536072 (hardcover library binding) | ebook ISBN 9780553536089 | ISBN 9781524772147 (intl. tr. pbk.)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Libraries—Fiction. | Contests—Fiction. | Books and reading—Fiction. | Eccentrics and eccentricities—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.G7487 Mm 2016 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Titles

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Is the Race Over?

  Author’s Note

  Mr. Lemoncello’s Great Library Race Book List

  Thank You…

  Chris Grabenstein

  For Barbara Bakowski and Alison Kolani

  and all the other copyeditors

  who have helped me keep my facts straight

  even though I write fiction

  This was a game Kyle Keeley refused to lose.

  For the first time since Mr. Lemoncello’s famous library escape contest, he was up against his old nemesis, Charles Chiltington.

  “Surrender, Keeley!” Charles jeered from three spaces ahead. “Chiltingtons never lose!”

  “Except, you know, when they do!” shouted Kyle’s best friend, Akimi Hughes. She was ten spaces behind Kyle and couldn’t stand seeing Charles in the lead.

  The life-size board game had been rolled out like a plastic runner rug around the outer ring of tables in the Rotunda Reading Room of Mr. Lemoncello’s library.

  “The game’s not over until it’s over, Charles,” Kyle said with a smile.

  He had landed on a bright red question mark square, while Charles was safe on “Free Standing.” A shaky collection of drifting holograms hovered over their heads, suspended in midair beneath the building’s magnificent Wonder Dome. The dome’s giant video screens were dark so they wouldn’t interfere with the ghostly green images creating what Mr. Lemoncello called a Rube Goldberg contraption—a device deliberately designed to perform a very simple task in an extremely complicated way.

  Most Rube Goldberg contraptions involve a chain reaction. In Mr. Lemoncello’s Rickety-Trickety Fact or Fictiony game, a new piece of the chain was added every time one of the players gave an incorrect answer. If someone reached the finish line before all the pieces lined up, they won. However, if any player gave one too many wrong answers, they would trigger the chain reaction and end up trapped under a pointed dunce cap.

  They would lose.

  “Are you ready for your question, Mr. Keeley?” boomed Mr. Lemoncello, acting as the quiz master.

  “Yes, sir,” said Kyle.

  “Fact or fiction for six,” said Mr. Lemoncello, reading from a bright yellow game card. “At five feet four inches, George Washington was the shortest American president ever elected. Would you like to answer or do the research?”

  It was a tough choice, especially since Kyle didn’t know the answer.

  If he did the research, he’d have to go back one space and lose a turn so he could look up the correct answer on one of the tablet computers built into the nearby reading desk.

  But while he was researching, Charles might surge ahead. He might even make it all the way to the finish line.

  On the other hand, even though Kyle didn’t know the answer, if he said either “fact” or “fiction,” he had a fifty-fifty chance of being right and moving forward six spaces, putting him in front of Charles, and that much closer to victory.

  Of course, Kyle also had a fifty-fifty chance of being wrong and adding what might be the final hologram to the wobbly contraption overhead.

  “Do the research, Kyle!” urged Akimi.

  “Please do,” sneered Charles.

  “Yo!” shouted another one of Kyle’s best buds, Miguel Ferna
ndez. “Don’t let Chiltington get under your dome, bro. He’s just playing mind games with you.”

  “Impossible.” Charles sniffed. “Keeley doesn’t have a mind for me to play with.”

  “Uh, uh, uh,” said Mr. Lemoncello. “Charles, I wonder if, just this once, you might choose kind?” He turned to Kyle. “Well, Mr. Keeley? No one can make this decision for you, unless, of course, you hire a professional decider, but trust me—they are decidedly expensive. Are you willing to put everything on a waffle and take a wild guess?”

  Kyle hated losing a turn when the whole idea was to win the game. He hated going backward when the object was to move forward.

  He studied the teetering collection of holograms suspended under the darkened dome. He looked at Charles, who was sneering back at him smugly.

  “I want to answer, sir.”

  “Very well,” said Mr. Lemoncello. “Let me repeat the question before the cucumbers I had for lunch repeat on me: At five feet four inches, George Washington was the shortest American president ever elected. Fact or fiction?”

  Kyle took a deep breath. He remembered some teacher once saying people were shorter back in the olden days. So odds were that Washington was a shrimp.

  “That, sir,” he said, “is a…fact?”

  A buzzer SCRONKed like a sick goose.

  “Sorry,” said Mr. Lemoncello. “It is, in fact, fiction. At six feet three inches, George Washington was one of our tallest presidents. It’s time to add another piece to our dangling-dunce-cap-trap contraption.”

  Electronic notes diddled up a scale.

  “Oh, dear,” said Mr. Lemoncello. “It looks like that’s the last straw!”

  A hologram of a striped milk carton straw floated into place. It shot a spitball at a hologram of an old-fashioned cash register, which hit a button, which made the cash drawer pop open with a BING! The drawer smacked a holographic golf ball, which BOINKed down seven steps of a staircase one at a time until it bopped into a row of dominoes, which started to tumble in a curving line. The final domino triggered a catapult, which fired a Ping-Pong ball, which smacked a rooster in the butt. The bird cock-a-doodle-dooed, which startled a tiny man in a striped bathing suit standing on top of a fifty-foot ladder so much that he leapt off, spiraled down, and landed with a splash in a wooden bucket, which, since it was suddenly heavier, pulled a rope that struck a match, which lit a fuse, which ignited a fireworks rocket, which blasted off, which knocked the dunce cap off its hook.

  The holographic hat of shame fell and covered Kyle like an upside-down ice cream cone.

  “Loser!” crowed Charles.

  Everybody else laughed.

  By taking a wild guess, Kyle hadn’t gone backward or lost a turn.

  But he’d definitely lost the game!

  Since the dunce cap was only a hologram, it couldn’t actually trap Kyle.

  But its laser-generated sides were equipped with motion sensors. So when Kyle tried to step out from under the flickering image of the giant parking-cone-shaped hat, he triggered some pretty embarrassing sound effects. Mostly gassy BLATTs and FWUUUUUMPs.

  All the other players were cracking up, so Kyle took a goofy bow.

  And activated the motion sensors again.

  FWUUUUUMP!

  “That’s Keeley, all right,” snickered Charles. “Nothing but windy blasts of gas.”

  “You’re right,” said Kyle, taking another bow and activating another FWUUUUUMP!

  “And you were in the lead, Charles, so you win. Congratulations.”

  He stuck his hand in and out of the laser grid to blare a gassy fanfare to the tune of “Happy Birthday to You”: BLATT-BLATT-BLATT-BLATT, FWUMP-FWUMP!

  “All right,” cried a no-nonsense voice in the midst of all the laughter. “Shut it down. Need to iron out that glitch.”

  There were six thumps and a loud whir, and then the holographic Rube Goldberg contraption disappeared. A bald man in a lab coat stepped out of the shadows, toting a tablet computer the size of a paperback.

  “Switch on the Wonder Dome,” he said to the flat screen he held in his palm.

  Instantly, the ten wedge-shaped, high-definition video screens lining the library’s colossal cathedral ceiling started shimmering as the dome went from black to its swirling, full-circle kaleidoscopic mode.

  “Friends,” announced Mr. Lemoncello, marching across the rotunda’s marble floor toward the man in the white coat, “allow me to introduce you to the library’s brand-new head imagineer, Mr. Chester ‘Chet’ Raymo, the genius behind my new Mind-Bogglingly Big ’n’ Wacky Gymnasium Games!” He cleared his throat and warbled, “Mr. Raymo is a brilliant brain-o! What he does is hard to explain-o!”

  Mr. Raymo was so busy tapping his tablet he didn’t realize that Mr. Lemoncello was singing his praises.

  The head imagineer wore thick black-rimmed glasses and a skinny black necktie and had seriously slumped shoulders. He looked like he could work at mission control for NASA.

  “I believe we need to make a few minor adjustments before we roll it out to the schools,” said Mr. Raymo. “Those sound effects activated when the loser attempted to escape were supposed to be burglar alarm bells, not farts.”

  “I know,” said Mr. Lemoncello. “I changed them.”

  Mr. Raymo nodded. Tapped his tablet again.

  “Duly noted.”

  “Thank you, Chet.” Mr. Lemoncello threw open his arms and, in a very loud voice, addressed the players still standing in various spots along the game board.

  “And thank you, one and all, for participating in this trial run of my newest gaming concept. Soon we will be able to take these same portable hologram projectors to gymnasiums, cafetoriums, and, if we hold our breath, natatoriums, so schools, even those with swimming pools, can use my life-size board games as fund-raisers—free of charge, of course.”

  “I really enjoyed the game,” said Sierra Russell, Kyle’s bookworm friend. “I was able to read two whole chapters while I waited for everybody else to spin and take their turns.”

  “It was awesome,” agreed Kyle, who loved all of Mr. Lemoncello’s wacky games, even the ones he lost.

  “Totally!” added Miguel.

  “It’s a rip-off,” scoffed Charles Chiltington, who’d been trying to run Mr. Lemoncello out of town ever since the eccentric billionaire first came home to Ohio and spent five hundred million dollars building Alexandriaville the most extraordinary high-tech library in the world.

  “I beg your pardon, Charles?” said Mr. Lemoncello, blinking repeatedly. “A rip-off?”

  “It’s just a warmed-over version of that old parlor game Botticelli! You should be more inventive. Like the Krinkle brothers.”

  The Krinkle brothers owned a huge game company that, in Kyle’s humble opinion, made extremely boring board games and dull generic stuff like Chinese checkers, pachisi, and dominoes. In fact, Kyle had come up with his own ad slogan for the rival game maker: “If it’s a Krinkle, it’s going to stinkle.”

  “See you later, losers.” Charles marched out of the Rotunda Reading Room.

  Kyle sometimes wondered why Charles was still allowed to come to the Lemoncello Library. He and his parents had done so much to try to wreck Mr. Lemoncello’s dreams. Since Kyle (along with all the other “champions” from the recent Library Olympics) was now on the library’s board of trustees, he once suggested that Charles (plus the rest of the Chiltington family) be banned from the building.

  When he did, Mr. Lemoncello gasped, clutched his chest, and pretended that he might faint or have a heart attack. Maybe both.

  “Why, if we did that, Kyle,” Mr. Lemoncello had said, “we couldn’t really call ourselves a library, could we?”

  Kyle knew his idol was right. Libraries were supposed to be for everybody. Even jerks like Charles, who always pretended to be super polite around grown-ups—except Mr. Lemoncello.

  “Not to be as nosy as Pinocchio,” Mr. Lemoncello said to Sierra, “but you seemed more interested in reading yo
ur book than in marveling at my latest holographic extravaganza.”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “Oh, there’s nothing to be sorry about—a game, by the way, that I wish I had invented. I was just curious about what you were reading.”

  “It’s called Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand.”

  Mr. Lemoncello waggled his eyebrows, put his hand to his mouth, and hollered, “Oh, Mr. Raymo? Is there a Seabiscuit in the house?”

  Suddenly, a bugle blared, a bell clanged, and two Thoroughbred racehorses, their jockeys up in the saddles, came thundering into the rotunda from the fire exit!

  “Racing through the first turn, it’s Seabiscuit leading in a surprise move!” cried the scratchy recorded voice of an old-fashioned racetrack announcer talking through his nose.

  Kyle and his friends leapt out of the way as the two horses and their jockeys whipped around the rim of the rotunda as if it were a racetrack.

  The breathless announcer kept going.

  “Seabiscuit is in the lead by one length…two lengths. War Admiral is right on his heels.”

  Dust clouds billowed up behind the holographic horses’ dirt-churning hooves.

  “Down the back stretch. There goes War Admiral after him. Now the horse race is on. They’re neck and neck, head and head, nose and nose. And it is either one; take your choice.”

  Kyle could feel the floor quaking as the two powerful horses galloped around the room.