Book overview
Winner of a 2025 Good Housekeeping Best Kids' Books Award!
A New York Times Bestseller
Read with Jenna Jr. Summer Reading List Pick!
"[An] atmospheric fantasy ride."--Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW
"Fast-paced and satisfying."--School Library Journal, STARRED REVIEW
"I couldn't put it down!"--Stuart Gibbs, New York Times bestselling author of the Spy School series
Two hundred years ago, an island disappeared. Benny has just two weeks to find it.
Everly "Benny" Benedict and her mom have always managed to get by, though they're broke most of the time. But all that could change. Benny's just learned she's the sole heir to the vast fortune of Evelyn Terry, a mysterious ancestor from the 1800s!
There's a catch, though. First Benny needs to play--and win--a game: following clues that are more than a century old, she must find her way to the tiny island Evelyn wrote about in her diary. It was somewhere off the shoreline of Evelyn's home town, but according to legend, it vanished long ago and hasn't appeared on maps for hundreds of years. Yet Benny has only a couple weeks to locate it.
If she's successful, she'll collect the inheritance. But what if there's more than a fortune at stake in this game? What if Benny has to break an ancient curse to win?