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Home , Peter Lerangis, The 39 Clues

Blog Tour: Access Granted,

Posted by Bianca Schulze on August 18, 2010

By Peter Lerangis, for The Children’s Book Review Published: August 18, 2010

Welcome to the 7th stop of The 39 Clues blog tour. We are thrilled to host Peter Lerangis! Be sure to enter the giveaway for your chance to win books 1-7 of this exciting and groundbreaking series.

The teacher looked distressed as she greeted me. “I can’t believe what happened to my class,” she said.

I braced myself. Behind her, hundreds of excited kids were filing in to the gym. They sat in sections based on the colors of their shirts: red, blue, green, gold, representing the four branches of the Cahill family. Most were dressed as 39 Clues characters. Jonah Wizard (with his bling) and Nellie Gomez (with her punk attire) were very popular — but also a set of twins dressed as fish (Saladin’s red snapper), a girl in a three-piece suit (Jonah’s dad), and a guy dressed as Nellie.

They seemed happy and engaged. So what had gone wrong?

I knew the school had chosen The 39 Clues as the theme for that year’s curriculum. Makes sense — the series is a worldwide search (geography) for Clues left by the most influential people of all time (history, science), involving twisty plots and strong emotional character connections (language arts) among colorful locales (visual art) and requiring the decoding of cryptic clues (mathematics, logic).

Hmm. Was the teacher disturbed by the intensity? It was kind of extreme …

That morning, the school had warned us to call ahead. As we got close, we were told to drive around the block and hide. When we finally got the OK to approach, our jaws hit the floor. The students were pouring out of the building, screaming, crowding against a line of traffic cones that stretched along the school. Another lane of cones had been set up for us to drive through. When I left the car and began high-fiving the kids, cones shmones — they mobbed me. On a video of the incident, you can hear a teacher saying, “Somebody get him before they kill him.” I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t Justin Bieber.

So maybe this teacher was worried — the way teachers in my elementary school had worried about our Beatles obsession. I felt a vague urge to apologize. “So, um … what did happen to your class?” I asked.

“Well, we just finished Book Two, and they have become obsessed … ” She met my eyes with a bewildered look. “ … with Mozart!”

I was speechless — not surprised, because if anyone could make an oddball eighteenth- century composer and his sister exciting, it’s — but speechless.

“And I panicked,” she continued. “I didn’t know a thing about Mozart!” She finally smiled, and when she glanced at her kids again, it was with great pride. “So I had to get CDs and other materials. We’ve been listening to his music, studying — and we’re learning so much! Now, with , they’re starting to get hooked on Japanese culture. I can’t wait!”

I couldn’t either.

Touring to promote The Sword Thief was one eye-opening experience after another. Part of the fun was that I was in the process of writing Book 7, The Viper’s Nest. I learned which characters the kids connected to best, which aspects of the hunt excited them the most. They became my guides. Until then I had been worried about writing a story involving historical figures relatively unknown to American kids (Shaka Zulu and Winston Churchill), in a locale fraught with a tortured historical legacy (South Africa).

But looking at this teacher, and at the throng of kids so excited about a book — not a movie or a song or a game or the latest app, but a book — I took courage. If they could bond with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, well, anything was possible!

About the author: Peter Lerangis is the acclaimed author of the Times bestseller The 39 Clues Book Three: The Sword Thief, as well as many other popular books for children, including Spy X, Antarctica, and the Watchers series. He lives with his family in .