Averil Offline

Ages 10 And Up, Grades 5 And Up

A fun, fast-paced story about a girl determined to cut the cord with her helicopter parents.

Twelve-year-old coder Averil can't do anything without her parents knowing. That’s because her mom uses the Ruby Slippers surveillance app to check where she is, who she texts, and even what she eats for lunch. Averil wonders how she’s ever going to grow up if she’s not allowed to learn from mistakes. When she learns that Ruby Slippers is about to become even more invasive, she teams up with Max, a new kid at school dealing with overbearing parents of his own. Together they figure out an almost foolproof way to ditch their parents and run away to the college campus that’s home to the quirky Ruby Slippers creator. It’s an extreme challenge just getting to meet with him—but the two kids cleverly figure out a series of puzzles and get their meeting. What they find gives them pause—and gets them thinking about the value of honesty in a new light. After all, isn’t trust at the heart of their parents' need to know?

Story Locale:Michigan

About the Author

Amy Noelle Parks (amynoelleparks.com) also wrote the middle grade novel Summer of Brave, as well as the young adult novels Lia and Beckett’s Abracadabra and The Quantum Weirdness of the Almost-Kiss. A professor of elementary education at Michigan State University, she helps future teachers recover from the trauma inflicted on them by years of school mathematics. Social media still scares her, but she’s working on it.

Author Residence: Okemos, MI