Finalist in the 2024 NZ Book Awards for Children & Young Adults
Can Lucas pull off staging an alien encounter and save his tiny country school from closure?
Check out Leonie’s Agnew’s madcap new novel for readers aged 8 years and older.
Eleven-year-old Lucas has got a new worry to add to his long, long list – his rural school is on the Ministry of Education’s list for closure. What’s his mum going to do if he and his sister have to start travelling to a school an hour or two away? She can’t drive them; she certainly can’t afford boarding school fees and already works long hours in a poultry processing plant to keep the family going. If the school closure goes through, they might have to move to the city. And there’s no way Lucas will ever leave his dad’s grave behind.
He and his friends come up with a mad idea to revive their town and save their school — they stage an alien encounter. Before they know it, tourists are flocking in to check out the crop circles and it looks like the plan might working. But there’s also the vehicle with tinted windows that seems to be following them around – why would it be interested in a group of country schoolkids?
Before Lucas knows it, he’s lost control of his plot, and a chain of unpredictable (and often hilarious) events that follow are quickly turning to chaos!
Leonie Agnew is reported to be an award-winning children's author, a former advertising copywriter, and currently moonlighting as a primary school teacher.
Witnesses claim her defining characteristic is a tendency to make things up. This is called lying, unless you write it down. Then it is pleasantly referred to as being an author.
Books
Website illustrations by Brunelle Dias
What critics are saying about The Memory Thief
“Following her last spellbinding tale The Impossible Boy, Leonie Agnew has created another spine-tingling adventure novel for middle-grade readers.”
“In taking the fantastical world and integrating it so seamlessly into the material, Agnew’s The Memory Thief solidifies her position as a writer of note in New Zealand.”
