The Portal in the Portable

"The Portal in the Portable" is a comic adventure story about friendship, fish-eyed movie directors, shortsighted Tyrannosaurus rexes, celebrity grade school teachers, submissive pirates, and the joys and perils of a powerful imagination. It is a novel for 9-12 year olds. Seamus Keen was bored. Life at home and at Tranquil Hills Elementary School was an unbearably tedious routine. While skipping class, Seamus meets a mysterious old man in a rainbow suit feeding breadcrumbs to pigeons, chipmunks, and sparrows in Colonel Humdrum Park. The old man throws a handful of breadcrumbs into the air and in an instant they are transformed into little planets spinning before Seamus’s awestruck eyes. Here was an endless blue garden that stretched over an entire world. There was an enormous stadium filled with cheering fans. Here was a golden city with golden towers. There was a vast ocean on which floated a little rowboat. And here was dark, mountainous island with a stone tower lit up by lightning from a dark cloud. Soon Seamus is invited on a journey, through a portal in his classroom portable, to visit strange new worlds that bring him far more excitement and danger than he ever could have imagined-- or wanted.