Scholastic Canada - Jayden's Rescue

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Scholastic Canada Ltd.
ISBN 0-439-98864-0 paperback
128 pages
Ages 8-12

An evil sorcerer-king is holding a queen named Jayden captive in his castle, and only Alex, Vanessa and Sam can help save her ... But wait a minute! These are three real-life kids — and the queen in trouble is part of a fictional fantasy story, in a book they’ve discovered.
The book is called Jayden’s Rescue, and it soon becomes clear to Alex and his friends that in some parallel world, Jayden really is in trouble. To help her, they have to solve the puzzles posed by a menagerie of kooky monster guards. There are four hundred of them — one for each room in the castle!


	Jayden's Rescue


	Jayden's Rescue


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Excerpt from Jayden's Rescue
by Vladimir Tumanov

Alex now found himself at the bottom of the page where a caption read: “Help Jayden answer this question and then turn the page.”

“No way am I doing the math!” Alex said to himself. Impatient to continue reading the rest of the adventure, he tried to go on without working out the answer. But the page would not turn. No matter how hard he pulled, the page stayed glued to the next one. In fact, the whole rest of the book was stuck tight. Alex shook the book, flipped it upside down and even blew on it. Nothing helped.

Disgusted, Alex tossed the book onto his desk. What was this, a bad joke? Some kind of trick thing, like that teeth-blackening “toothpaste” sold at so-called magic shops? Alex laughed. “Some magic!” he said, and then, with dawning excitement, he breathed, “Magic...”

Slowly, Alex reached out and picked up the book again. Could it be? He would never have believed it if he hadn’t had a magic pencil in his own hands not very long ago. The magic pencil! If he had it right now, Alex would gladly wear it down to a stump to help Jayden. But without the pencil, he could never figure out the first puzzle, let alone four hundred of them. Without the magic pencil, Alex was useless, and Jayden was doomed.

Alex studied the picture of Jayden facing the hideous one-eyed thing. He felt so sorry for the Emerald Queen that he could not bring himself to close the book. What if he tried really hard to solve the puzzle? He had nothing to lose, and the rest of the evening was before him. So Alex took out a pile of paper and an ordinary yellow pencil with an eraser.

Twenty minutes later the floor around his desk was strewn with crumpled sheets. Alex felt as if he had just run a marathon; it was not going well. Gloomily, he stared at the picture. His eye fell on the monster's hands and feet: ten digits on each. Math would be easier with so many fingers and toes to count on . . . forty of them, just like the total number of eyes in the puzzle. Idly, Alex subtracted the fingers that were already occupied holding the diamond-tipped staff. 40 minus 10: the numbers flashed like neon in his mind, and he suddenly knew where to start. On a fresh piece of paper he wrote:

There are 40 eyes in all. To find out how many eyes belong to the guests, the eyes of the one-eyed host family must be subtracted from 40. There is 1 one-eyed father and 9 one-eyed sons, which makes 10 eyes. So 40 - 10 = 30 eyes. The guests have 30 eyes altogether. If each one has 3 eyes, 30 must be divided by 3. That makes 10 guests. One of them is the three-eyed father: 10 - 1 = 9. There are 9 three-eyed kids.

After writing down his solution, Alex tried turning the page again. It worked! He saw a picture of Jayden giving a piece of paper to the one-eyed guard. The door behind him was opening...

From Jayden's Rescue, copyright © 2002 by Vladimir Tumanov.

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"I thought it was a very well thought out book." Lisa S., Age 10, U.S.A., Rating: 10

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