11-Year-Old Girl Gets Stranded on Desert Island with Family and Ignores Rescue Vessel

Dec. 11, 2013 - PRLog -- 11-Year-Old Girl Gets Stranded on Desert Island with Family and Ignores Rescue Vessel

A Novel For Children and Young Adults Alike, Screen Writer, J.T. Allen Releases First Book Via Sumus Press In Time For Holiday Reading

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (Los Angeles, CA) - Newly debuted novel, Daisy and the Pirates, a hilarious young adult adventure narrated by sardonic pre-teen, Daisy Tannenbaum (as conceived by longtime screen writer J. T. Allen), has been released by Sumus Press as an e-book, available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other web outlets.

If tasked with reading to the kids, or entertaining yourself anytime between now and the new year, Daisy and the Pirates may save your life, or at least keep you from falling asleep while you read. Allen has written a story with enough twists and turns to fire the imaginations of children and young adults, while providing plenty of wit and literary mojo to satisfy the palate of even the most sophisticated readers.

The story centers around eleven-year-old Daisy Tannenbaum (yes, like "O Tannenbaum," German for Christmas Tree) who hates her name and is something of a survivalist.  There's no doubt she'll be quite a feminist someday, but in the meantime she seems to want two things: to miss as much school as possible and to bring her divorced parents back together again, or at least to make them behave like they did on Christmas mornings in their pre-breakup past, a past that even Daisy recognizes is probably mythical.

In a series of stunning coincidences, the Tannenbaum family ends up hijacked by modern-day pirates and marooned on an isolated island, where, of course, there is buried treasure.  (Why else get stuck on an island?)  Only Daisy has the skill-set to survive and her undaunted optimism pull everyone together.  This is not to say Daisy is flawless.  She is mercurial, bratty, picks on her sister endlessly, contemplates suicide, dreams up all kinds of impossible schemes, ridicules her "parental units" and ends up regretting it when they get back together.

Despite the outlandish plot (cribbed, so it seems, from Robert Louis Stevenson, Patrick O'Brian, Henri Charriere, and maybe, oh,  S. J. Perelman) the whole thing seems plausible, a compliment to Daisy's—er—Mr. Allen's narrative skill.  Refreshingly, there isn't a bit of magic and no sign of wizards or zombies.  As Daisy herself says, "Don't expect me to fly or wave a wand or any of that other phony stuff."

Probably the best passages of the book for adult readers are when Daisy relates more than she realizes—remaining unsentimental, for instance, after she is nearly killed by a scorpion bite, while the reader sees how frantic her parents are for her to survive.  At 143 pages, Daisy and the Pirates is a readable gem, packed with enough silliness and pathos to please just about everyone.  Except maybe Daisy.

Daisy and the Pirates, J. T. Allen, Sumus Press, ISBN: 978-0-615-88559-9. Amazon link: http://amzn.to/17paNuJ

To find more information on Daisy, please visit her web page: http://www.daisytannenbaum.com/

Media Contact:          Kyrstin Stone // The Avenue West

         Kyrstin@theavenuewest.com (mailto:nina@theavenuewest.com) // 310-633-1335