Author:  Wim Coleman & Pat Perrin
ISBN: 978-1-935178-03-3

Click Here To Purchase The Taker and the Keeper (The Red Monocle) 

A new, creative, and compelling tale that takes us back to the time of King Arthur.

Gregory Guest is in middle school, and he can't seem to understand why each new day of his young life is becoming harder and harder.  The sky is clear, but not as blue as it should be; and all the people around him who are usually kind and nurturing have turned testy and mean-spirited.  His father, his step mother, his brother - not to mention his teachers - seem to have turned against him and each other, groaning and moaning about life and snapping at everything anyone says.  What is going on in the world?
 
Gregory helps his science teacher clean up the classroom.  A new teacher has arrived because Ms. McDougal - one of the strangest people in the town of Bainesboro - has left her position at the school and dropped everything without a word of explanation, except that she needed to do some research.  In an old closet, Gregory finds a box labeled junk, and the new teacher tells him he can have it.  The box is filled with a vast array of spectacles, monacles and broken pairs of glasses that have lenses of every color.  When Gregory picks up a small red-tinged monacle, a tingling feeling begins in his limbs.  He stares through the strange antique and watches as a dark doorway appears in a wall in Gregory's favorite place...the ravine under the bridge in his town.  Keeping the monacle to his eye, Gregory enters the strange doorway into complete and total darkness.  He should turn back, but something in him forces him forward until he sees a small patch of light in the distance.  As he walks into the light, a pair of young boys, with wooden swords in hand, get scared.  They scream at Gregory, with his one-red-eye - calling him a demon, and force him back through his magic tunnel into his own world.
 
Add to the story a young girl named Yola who is a great fan of the story of King Arthur.  She carries a book about that time period with her wherever she goes, because she absolutely loves the story of Arthur, his knights and the mighty sword Excalibur.  But one morning, the story in her book has changed.  The pictures are gone, and King Arthur has grown up to be a drunken farmer and not the notable King that literally saved the world.  But how could an imaginary story change?  And what possible effect would a legend have on today's world as we know it?
 
The two children team together and enter the tunnel once again, into a world that's supposed to be beloved...but absolutely fake; a world of courage and honor that was made up a very long time ago.  But could Merlin be real?  And if the old man they meet is real, why has the great magician forgotten the name of the sword that Arthur pulls from the stone?  Why can't the msyterious Lady of the Lake rise from the water anymore?  Why must she stand on a boat?  And what happened to the sword in the stone that apparently must be there in order for the world to be "righted" once again?
 
This is a fantastic story, to say the least.  I was enthralled and enraptured with the children who fought for the pride and honor that's needed in our daily lives.  And there was a particular plotline that I absolutely wish everyone in the world would read and comprehend.  The writers tell us that a world with no imagination is mean spirited.  We feed off legends to make the world a better place.  We've learned to believe in being prideful of our families and ourselves - not to mention valiant warriors who save damsels in distress.  If you don't believe this theory, just look at the millions of dollars we spend on books and movies every year.  Creativity is the backbone to our survival as a human race.  If we didn't have it, if we didn't get enthralled by legends and stories of friendship and love, then we'd just be a bunch of robots with no brains, hearts, and souls to capture our dreams.