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Middleworld
“As I see it,” said Max, “all that stands between humankind and the end of the world is two talking monkeys, a crazy archaeologist covered in red paint, and a couple of kids with blowguns. Am I right?”
Fourteen-year-old Max Murphy, video-gamer extraordinaire, is furious when his archaeologist parents cancel the family vacation to go on a dig in Central America. But things go from bad to worse when Max is summoned to join them, only to discover that his parents have vanished. With the help of Lola, a fast-talking, quick-thinking Maya girl, Max embarks on a quest to find out just what’s going on. Soon Max and Lola are running for their lives in the perilous rainforest, as they unlock ancient secrets, meet mysterious strangers, and begin to understand that, in San Xavier, nothing is ever as it seems.
Fate has delivered a challenge of epic proportions to Max Murphy. But can a teen whose biggest talent is for video games rescue his parents from the Maya Underworld and save himself from the villainous Lords of Death?
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Middleworld
“As I see it,” said Max, “all that stands between humankind and the end of the world is two talking monkeys, a crazy archaeologist covered in red paint, and a couple of kids with blowguns. Am I right?”
Fourteen-year-old Max Murphy, video-gamer extraordinaire, is furious when his archaeologist parents cancel the family vacation to go on a dig in Central America. But things go from bad to worse when Max is summoned to join them, only to discover that his parents have vanished. With the help of Lola, a fast-talking, quick-thinking Maya girl, Max embarks on a quest to find out just what’s going on. Soon Max and Lola are running for their lives in the perilous rainforest, as they unlock ancient secrets, meet mysterious strangers, and begin to understand that, in San Xavier, nothing is ever as it seems.
Fate has delivered a challenge of epic proportions to Max Murphy. But can a teen whose biggest talent is for video games rescue his parents from the Maya Underworld and save himself from the villainous Lords of Death?
“As I see it,” said Max, “all that stands between humankind and the end of the world is two talking monkeys, a crazy archaeologist covered in red paint, and a couple of kids with blowguns. Am I right?”
Fourteen-year-old Max Murphy, video-gamer extraordinaire, is furious when his archaeologist parents cancel the family vacation to go on a dig in Central America. But things go from bad to worse when Max is summoned to join them, only to discover that his parents have vanished. With the help of Lola, a fast-talking, quick-thinking Maya girl, Max embarks on a quest to find out just what’s going on. Soon Max and Lola are running for their lives in the perilous rainforest, as they unlock ancient secrets, meet mysterious strangers, and begin to understand that, in San Xavier, nothing is ever as it seems.
Fate has delivered a challenge of epic proportions to Max Murphy. But can a teen whose biggest talent is for video games rescue his parents from the Maya Underworld and save himself from the villainous Lords of Death?
Jon Voelkel grew up in Peru, Costa Rica and Colombia. He was not a natural-born adventurer and found life in the jungle difficult, to say the least. Having survived monkey stew, an attack by giant rats, and a plane crash in the middle of the rainforest, he escaped to college in Minneapolis and went on to business school in Barcelona. After working in advertising agencies in Spain, Holland and England, he started his own agency in London with four other partners - one of whom would be his future wife. In 2001, the London Financial Times named him one of the top fifty creative minds in Britain.
While Jon was battling the daily perils of the jungle, Pamela Craik Voelkel was writing stories and dreaming of adventure in a sedate seaside town in the north of England where nothing ever happened. After graduating from Leeds University in English Language and Literature, she fled to London to take any job with "writer" in the title. After stints reviewing books, writing catalogs and penning speech bubbles for photo-romances, she become an advertising copywriter. As Creative Director of Craik Jones Watson Mitchell Voelkel, she helped the agency win literally hundreds of creative awards.
In 2001, the Voelkels moved to rural Vermont and began work on 'Middleworld', the first book they have written together. In an interesting male/female collaboration, Jon plots out the action (much of it based on his own childhood memories and the bedtime stories he tells their three children), then Pamela fleshes out the characters and decides how they feel about things.
Preface: The dream 2 I. The end of the world 8 II. The Curse of the Maya 24 III. Aguas Muertas 39 IV. The Villa Isabella 54 V. Max goes bananas 69 VI. Family secrets 83 VII. Thieves in the night 97 VIII. The monkey girl 109 IX. In the dark 122 X. Strange weather 131 XI. Rat-on-a-stick 144 XII. The feast 159 XIII. Monkey River 174 XIV. Itzamna 188 XV. The oath of blood 198 XVI. The cosmic crocodile 205 XVII. Trick or treat 226 XVIII. The chicken of death 244 XIX. Monkey business 256 XX. Counting the days 269 XXI. Preparing for battle 278 XXII. The black pyramid 291 XXIII. Captured 314 XXIV. The showdown 324 XXV. Human sacrifice 335 XXVI. Morning 347 Appendix: a guide to the maya world 365
Introduction
Introduction: DEAR READER,
Like some of the teenagers who reviewed this manuscript for us, you may object to one of the names in this story. You can't have a hero called Lord Six-Rabbit, you may say. It's not regal enough. Why, to modern ears, he sounds more like a cuddly toy than a fearsome warrior king. You're right, of course. But if this book leads you to read more about Maya civilization, you'll meet other strangely named kings such as Stormy Sky, Smoke Monkey, Green Macaw and Smoking Frog. Then you may be glad that our hero was inspired by a great eighth century ruler called Eighteen-Rabbit, and not by Stormy Sky's father, the ingloriously named Curl Snout. Here are some more things you should know before you read on . . .
The Ancient Maya called our world Middleworld, because it was sandwiched between the upper world of the heavens and the underworld, which they called Xibalba.
The Jaguar Stones are fictional, as are all the main characters except for Friar Diego DeLanda. He was the true-life Spanish priest who, in 1562, reduced the sum of Ancient Maya knowledge to ashes by making one huge bonfire of all their hundreds of folding bark books. (As far as we know, only three books and a fragment of a fourth survived.)
San Xavier is a fictional country based on present-day Belize. Maya or Mayan? We have followed the scholarly precedent of using Maya as both noun and adjective to describe the people and their culture, reserving the word Mayan for the family of thirty languages still spoken by the six million Maya living in Central America today.