Cleo Porter and the Body Electric

Gr 4-6–Twelve-year-old Cleo lives in an apartment with her brilliant surgeon mother and virtual designer father. Cleo’s entire world is the sealed apartment and the online world she visits a few hours a day for school and social gatherings. Her mother performs surgeries daily via drone utilizing the same virtual reality. Cleo’s world is turned upside-down when she receives a mysterious package meant for someone else—the system does not allow for mistakes. The package contains very important medicine, without which, the true recipient will die. Despite her looming medical studies test, Cleo dives into the mystery of who the medicine belongs to and how she can get it delivered. Finding nothing online, she decides to do the unthinkable: leave her apartment and deliver the medicine herself. When Cleo is accidentally dumped outside the massive apartment building into the real world, she must use all of her strength to get back into a building designed to keep everyone and everything out, and save someone’s life while she’s at it. Cleo is exactly the hero today’s readers need. She is plucky, tenacious, loyal, and funny. Readers of all backgrounds will relate to the virtual learning and isolation.