I recently came across a short review I wrote of High Flyer with a Flat Tire when I was about eleven years old. I had to write a “mini review”, book summary, and short author biography. Text in square brackets, [ ], was added at the writing of this post.
Review
High Flyer with a Flat Tire by Paul McCusker is a pretty good book. The main character, Mark Prescott, has just moved to town and has already been accused of slashing Joe Devlin’s new bike tire! Mrs. Devlin is going to make Mark pay for a new tire, so he and his new friend, Patti, try to find who the real culprit is. This book has many surprising plot twists to it. For example, Mark finds evidence showing that Patti may have been the culprit. I give this book [3/5 stars (star rating was shown in an image in the original Word document)].
Summary
In High Flyer With a Flat Tire by Paul McCusker[, McCusker] writes about a fictional character called Mark Prescott, who has just moved to Odyssey a few weeks ago and has already been accused of slashing the tire of Joe Devlin’s new bike. Mark and his new friend Patti Eldridge try to find who really slashed Joe’s tire so that Mrs. Devlin wouldn’t make him pay for a new tire and ruin his reputation just when he moved there. The Devlin’s [Ugghhh it should be Devlins, not Devlin’s. It’s not possessive!] persist in the accusations against Mark, and even Mrs. Devlin even accuses him of hitting Joe in the eye. Mark and Patti walk around town questioning suspects, and visiting the scene of the crime for clues.
Author Biography
Paul McCusker is a writer of many different kinds of things. You may know him from Adventures In Odyssey and Focus On The Family Radio Theatre. Or the Father Gilbert Mysteries. Or the Augustine Institute audio dramas Brother Francis: The Barefoot Saint of Assisi and The Trials of Saint Patrick [italicization of titles added for clarity]. Or plays like The First Church of Pete’s Garage and Catacombs. Or C.S. Lewis projects like The Chronicles of Narnia audio dramas or The Annotated Screwtape Letters. Or the film Beyond The Mask. Or lots of other dramas, novels, scripts and lyrics. He simply can’t make up his mind what he likes to write. [Okay, so I didn’t mean this sentence in a derogatory way but it came off a little bit like that when I look back at it]
On the topic of the biography, as I was writing this post I looked for an image of the front cover for the blog post image. When looking, I happened upon the Goodreads page for High Flyer with a Flat Tire and found something that shocked me, to say the least. The author bio for Paul McCusker was exactly, word-for-word, my author biography!
I don’t know how they got this description, but it’s pretty interesting how it ended up on Amazon’s book website.
As context for the next paragraph, at this point I’ve just written in my WordPress draft the previous section you’ve read about Goodreads.
Okay. I’m even more shocked now. I looked on Paul McCusker’s official website, paulmccusker.com and, you guessed it, my 11-year-old self’s same author biography was used on McCusker’s personal website!
At this point I’m starting to doubt whether the author biography was a part of the assignment, or just an author biography from the Internet that was in the document with my book summary for some reason.
Anyways, that was what my younger self wrote like. I hope I’ve improved since then! If you’d like more throw-back type posts, I can look for old stuff I wrote relating to Odyssey and/or audio drama and post them on Adventures in Opinons! Also, if you’d like to keep up to date on the latest AIO news in blog form, check out the AIO Insider!
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