Droppington Place

It's a plot to murder William Shakespeare: to shut up the most annoying mouth in Queen Elizabeth's England.

And who better to silence the Bard than a copy of playwright Winchester Penrose - a homunculus, an alchemical duplicate, that will revert to the sawdust from whence it came after the deed is done?

Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare's rival, thinks it's a capital plan, a perfect idea, right up until the sawdust man runs away with the sorcerer's spellbook, and chaos breaks loose.

Twenty-first century Byron Bishop gets pulled by the eyeball - yes, the eyeball - into the world created by the homunculus Penrose: a world made entirely of paper. Paper sky, paper streets, paper houses... even paper people - and right into the middle of this nefarious plot.

On the plus side, he finds Hailey Shen and Kyle Rodriguez, two of his friends from middle school, equally trapped.

On the negative side, they are equally trapped, and Penrose's sawdust head is filled with some radical ideas about right and wrong, and life and death.

And Byron's still sorting out his parents' divorce. He's got plenty to worry about on his own.

Will they ever escape from Penrose's magical clutches? Will they, too, get turned to paper? What happens to Shakespeare? Will Penrose every shut up?

Droppington Place free-wheels through time, flickering between the real and the magical, the dramatic and the adventurous, as Byron, Hailey and Kyle fight a crazy battle of wits, or perhaps a battle of crazy wits, to get home.

If you like playing with words, and if you like Shakespeare, you'll love this book.