A Fun Book for Fourth and Fifth Graders
Marvin Mallard is a flying-impaired duck who has managed to survive to adolescence because he’s very good at hiding in his surroundings. (At Duckmont High, he was the top student in Advanced Camouflage.)
Marvin has a good heart, but he uses bad judgment and often gets into trouble. His antics make him a regular at a detention center called the Quackery, where Principal Ruffledfeathers has tried in vain to reform the juvenile ducklinquent.
After getting into trouble again and violating the terms of his probation, Marvin is sentenced to three months of hard labor in the prison-state of Jugaloo – and then the action, fast and furious, begins.
With the help of the gopher Digger von Under and his fellow Frustrators who run the Secret Underground Railroad, Marvin makes a dramatic escape and winds up in Willavanna. There he learns the whereabouts of what had become his Holy Grail: a medallion that makes your mind very clear and helps you get wised up – if you have a pure heart.
Marvin wants to get wised up so he can stay out of trouble. When he finally gets the medallion, the first thing that becomes clear to him is that staying out of trouble is simply not doing anything bad. That, he realizes, is very different from actually doing something good. From this point on, Marvin becomes a mallard on a mission: to get wised up so he can do some good.
Digger von Under
Loaded with wordplay and off-beat humor that will quack up adults as well as kids, Marvin Mallard and the Magic Medallion stresses the importance of honesty, with its main moral being that we should rise above blaming others and take responsibility for our own actions.
This chapter book also stresses the advantages of working together, for, in the end, the flying-impaired Marvin makes himself a deal (instead of a meal) with a visually-impaired eagle – that he ride on her back and navigate her so they can both fly wherever they want to go.
Eighteen spectacular, full-color illustrations fuel the imagination and help bring this delightful tale to life. The illustrations, drawn with colored pencils by Sharyl Steinmark, are set between text in the good, old-fashioned way.
If you would like to read the first three chapters of the book, complete with the illustrations, I’ve got them for you in a PDF file. Click HERE to read them (8 pages).
If you would like to listen to a reading of the next three chapters (four through six), I’ve got it for you in an MP3 file. Click HERE to listen to it (20:29).
I wrote this story for my daughter, Juliáe.
After doing two printings of the paperback, I have decided, for financial and environmental reasons, to henceforth sell Marvin Mallard and the Magic Medallion only as an illustrated eBook and as an unabridged audiobook.
Thanks for visiting my website. Best wishes to you for a whole lot of things to smile about and laugh about. I hope that Marvin Mallard and the Magic Medallion will be in the mix.
