The Flinkwater Factor

Ginger must save her high-tech hometown from robots gone rogue in this quirky, dryly funny (Booklist) science fiction novel from National Book Awardwinning author Pete Hautman.Welcome to Flinkwater, Iowa, home of the largest manufacturer of Articulated Computerized Peripheral Devices in the world. If you own a robot, it probably came from Flinkwater. Meet Ginger Crump, the plucky, precocious (and somewhat sarcastic) genius who finds herself in the middle of a national emergency when Flinkwaters computers start turning people into vegetables. Mental vegetables, that is. In Gingers words, theyve been bonked. When Gingers father is bonked, she recruits her self-declared future husband, boy genius Billy George, to help her find the source of the bonkings. Soon theyre up against a talking dog, a sasquatch, and a zombie, while Flinkwater is invaded by an army of black SUVs led by the witless-but-dangerous Agent Ffelps from Homeland Security. Can Ginger get to the bottom of the bonkings, or will computer chaos reign forever?