Buzz Parker – illustratör

With her trademark black hair and spunky attitude, Emily the Strange is a follower of no one but herself. In her first adventure, Emily finds herself in the small, sinister town of Blackrock with no memory of how she got there, who she is, or even of her own name. Armed with only a blank notebook and a slingshot, but befriended by four black cats, can she puzzle out Blackrock's hidden secret and how it connects to her own amnesia?

Internationally known, and instantly recognizable, thirteen-year-old Emily is a mad scientist, a cat lover, and a rock guitarist whose unequivocal message is that your greatest strength lies in being yourself. Told in Emily's inimitable first-person narrative, this quirky and irresistible tale is part mystery, part adventure, and wholly strange.

Read all the wildly inventive adventures of Emily the Strange:

The Diaries of Emily the Strange: The Lost Days

The Diaries of Emily the Strange: Stranger and Stranger

The Diaries of Emily the Strange: Dark Times

The Diaries of Emily the Strange: Piece of Mind

13 Elements you will find in the first Emily the Strange novel:

1. Mystery

2. A beautiful golem

3. Souped-up slingshots

4. Four black cats

5. Amnesia

6. Calamity Poker

7. Angry ponies

8. A shady truant officer

9. Top-13 lists

10. A sandstorm generator

11. Doppelgängers

12. A secret mission

13. Earwigs

Emily the Strange: 13 years old. Able to leap tall buildings, probably, if she felt like it. More likely to be napping with her four black cats; or cobbling together a particle accelerator out of lint, lentils, and safety pins; or rocking out on drums/ guitar/saxophone/zither; or painting a swirling feral sewer mural; or forcing someone to say "swirling feral sewer mural" 13 times fast . . . and pointing and laughing.

Emily is . . .

1. A mad scientist

2. A cat lover

3. A mural painter

4. A golem builder

5. A virtuo-spastic guitarist

6. A wicked skater

7. A wily troublemaker

8. A poltergeist tamer

9. A mystery solver

10. A master prankster

11. An eXtreme procrastinator

12. A happy loner

13. A unique individual

. . . and now there are two of her.

Emily''s uniquely strange homeschool syllabus includes:

1. Time Travel 1012. Advanced Spy Photography3. Bonnet Basics 4. Great Aunts Through the Ages5. Intro to Germ Theory6. Care and Feeding of ''Squito Fish7. Fundamentals of Black Rock 8. Spiderweb Embroidery9. Historical & Contemporary Felines10. Pop Quizzes11. Foodstuffs of the 1780s12. Thwarting Ancestral Enemies 13. Techniques in Parallel