The beginning had some merit to it, but the rest of the book was a disappointment. Although it is a fairly short book, I practically had to force myself to finish it. Cooney books and this has to be one of the more disappointing ones. Caroline lives in Westbrook, Connecticut and when she's not writing she volunteers at a hospital, plays piano for the school musicals and daydreams! She often organizes what she calls a 'plotting game,' in which students work together to create plots for stories. To keep her stories realistic, Caroline visits many schools outside of her area, learning more about teenagers all the time. 'In a suspense novel, you can count on action.' Suspense novels are her favorites to read and write. She began to sell stories to Seventeen magazine and soon after began writing books. When her children were young, Caroline started writing books for young people - with remarkable results.

I started writing then and never stopped!' 'He used to rip off covers from The New Yorker and pass them around and make us write a short story on whichever cover we got. (Sept.Caroline Cooney knew in sixth grade that she wanted to be a writer when 'the best teacher I ever had in my life' made writing her main focus. As he improvises a daring yet ultimately plausible scheme to save his beloved city, Mitty makes a convincing transformation from sweet-natured slacker to bona fide hero. The protagonist's rash e-mail queries make him the target of a terrorist group that aims to harvest the smallpox virus from his body. Just to test this, Mitty and his dad would sometimes get a hot dog, sushi or a toothbrush at three a.m.').

(Wild as this plot element may seem, it is based on a recent, real-life event, as a closing author's note explains.) Though initially pleased to have averted academic disaster, an ominous fear grows in the boy: Did he ingest a portion of the scabs and could he now be incubating the smallpox virus? Mitty's realization that he may be a walking viral time bomb is neatly underscored by Cooney's affectionate rendering of his uniquely New York lifestyle ('Everything was always open. Hunting for a topic for his biology research paper on infectious disease, Manhattan private schooler Mitty Blake picks up an antique textbook, discovers an envelope within its pages, and takes out its contents: scabs from a long-ago smallpox epidemic. ) rat-a-tat delivery and hairpin turns keep the pages turning in this attention-grabbing post-9/11 thriller.

Code orange by caroline b cooney