Jake and Dana face dinosaurs from space and a zombie apocalypse. Can they survive? Can they save the city? Can they find a bathroom?
Jake Blatowski can’t wait for high school—basketball, calculus, and a cafeteria that isn’t under investigation by the health department.
But he’ll have to wait: A computer malfunction has assigned him to the fifth grade!
It’s bad enough that he bangs his knees on the desks or that Miss Percy is going over long division . . . again . . . but Jake has to sit next to Dana Volt, a perpetually surly troublemaker determined to make his life a living hell.
Worse yet, Dana secretly belongs to a coalition of girls who protect humanity from the horde of deadly monsters plaguing the city—monsters that have chosen Jake as their next target!
Jake’s no hero; he just wants to make it to varsity tryouts. But now the impulsive and moody Dana is the only one who can save Jake from certain death—and Jake is the only one who can save Dana from herself.
While I was working long days on an archaeological project, I sat down one night to eat a reheated dinner picked up from a gas station while I watched an episode of the anime Shugo Chara. That night, probably inspired by the anime, I had a peculiar but vivid dream about a hapless teenage boy who should have been in high school … but got sent back to fifth grade because of a computer glitch that erased part of his academic record. There, a little girl tormented him mercilessly, and he found to his surprise and chagrin that he couldn’t do anything about it. That became the germ of Jake and the Dynamo. I have had an enormous amount of fun writing about Jake, Dana, and their misadventures with a motley collection of monstrosities and crazy magical girls. I hope you laugh at least half as much while reading this book as I laughed while writing it.
