Books with author Martin McKenna

The Gnome’s Plight is the first book of The Tulin Series. Ten-year-old Tulin discovers he has a rare talent for communicating with inanimate objects when a house and a tree strike up conversations with him. He soon finds that his talents are needed to rescue a family of gnomes and a pink plastic flamingo. Through his unusual friends, Tulin enters a world of adventure, and finds his passion.

"The Word Gang" is the story of three kids in school who start using big words to be disruptive. Kalisha Jackson is a girl with a stomach-churning secret - she cut school for a year and never got caught! A new year begins. Kalisha decides to go back to school. While waiting for the bus she sees an old man struggling with a heavy grocery cart. She stops to help and meets Albrecht Spinoza, a man who can speak seventeen languages, but who has no one to talk to since the death of his wife, Rosa. Kalisha is late the first day setting off a conflict with her teacher, Jack Ralston. She's been stuck in something called "Project Restart," a strange new program in which the penalty for not doing well is a special classroom in Juvenile Hall. Mr. Spinoza gives Kalisha a copy of the Compact Oxford Dictionary. But the more "big" words Kalisha learns, the less everyone understands her and the madder Jack Ralston seems to get. Which to Kalisha and her new friends sounds like fun - and a great way to destroy Project Restart! That is, if they don't get "trammeled," "proscribed," or "incarcerated," first.