The 39 Clues Blog Tour: Access Granted,
Peter Lerangis
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 eighteenthcentury composer and his sister exciting, it’s Gordon Korman — 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 Vienna — and
we’re learning so much! Now, with The Sword Thief, 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 New York 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 New York City.