The Glitch Hunters: A Middle Grade Novel - Break the Rules to Beat the Game

⭐ A middle-grade sci-fi adventure about thinking sideways, breaking rules for the right reasons, and the friends you find in the spaces nobody else is looking.🎮 The game is supposed to be educational. Leo is supposed to do his homework. The wall is supposed to be solid. It isn't.When the world's first fully-immersive educational VR game launches simultaneously to every kid in the country, twelve-year-old Leo Castellano does what he always does: starts looking for seams. He finds one almost immediately—a hairline gap in the lobby wall, a physics glitch, a door the developers forgot to finish.Then the server crashes. The Log Out button disappears. And a very nervous developer named Anya comes over the PA system to explain that no one can leave until the 24-hour countdown hits zero—and that what happens to neural-link data at that point is, probably, fine.To escape, Leo will need to travel through the game's unrendered zones, navigate a basement world beneath the map, and find a path to the Admin Tower that doesn't appear on any official guide. He'll need his new party: Madi, a ruthless speedrunner with hair-trigger reflexes; Jimmy, a dedicated lore-hunter who once spent four minutes pressing E on a purely cosmetic fountain; and Four—a glitching tutorial sprite with corrupted memory, a dead-pixel eye, and the rare ability to open doors that shouldn't exist.He'll also need to face the Proctor. An undefeatable AI enforcer with infinite hit points, a weapon that deletes rather than damages, and one function: remove anything that doesn't follow the rules.Leo has never been very good at following the rules. But he's starting to learn that some walls are worth breaking and some are worth leaving alone—and that knowing the difference might be the most important skill of all.📖 The Glitch Hunters is perfect for:✔ Readers aged 9–14 who love gaming, puzzles, and smart protagonists✔ Fans of Ready Player One, The Wild Robot, and Aru Shah and the End of Time✔ Kids who ask "what's on the other side of the wall?" about everything✔ Parents and educators looking for STEM-adjacent fiction that champions creative problem-solving✔ Anyone who has ever found the seam in a game and needed to know what was behind itA standalone middle-grade novel. 15 chapters. Ages 9–14. Suitable for school and home reading. Themes include: creative problem-solving, neurodivergent thinking, friendship, and the ethics of rule-breaking. Read more