The Oliver Nocturne Series

Scholastic: 2008-2009
Scholastic Australia / New Zealand 2009-2010
La Factoria De Ideas (Spain) 2009-2010
Editions Milan (France) 2010-2011

For a vampire, Oliver Nocturne's existence is fairly normal.  He wakes each evening and heads off to school, where he and his classmates learn the long history of their kind, and the skills they will need when they receive their demons and become adults.
But Oliver is different than those around him- his gore-loving schoolmates, his loving vampire parents, and his obnoxious older brother, Bane. That's because, unbeknownst to Oliver, he's a little more human than the rest of them. When Emalie, an artistic and defiant human girl with a troubled past, unknowingly takes a picture of him, its sets them both off on a quest to uncover his true origins and the special purpose the vampire world has in store for him.
Learn more about the series at:
www.olivernocturne.com

Carlos is Gonna Get It
Arthur A. Levine Books: October 2008

A 2010 BBYA Nominee

Read reviews HERE:

No vampires in this hardcover novel, but there are middle school kids, severed doll heads, and the possibility of aliens...

"This first line of this novel literally just came to me in the last month of my elementary school teaching job in Dorchester, MA, just south of Boston.  I was at an overnight camp on Cape Cod with the third, fourth and fifth graders.  We had gone swimming in the low tide ocean, and taken a nature walk on a boardwalk chock full of turtles.   I was standing in the cabin looking out the window, it was probably snack time, and whammo- 'We decided to play a trick on Carlos.'  Before that, I'd had no other thoughts about the story."

"Every year one of the teachers would take the middle school kids on a hiking trip to Cardigan Lodge in NH, so much of the scenery and detail in those settings is as real as I can remember it.  And there were big thunderstorms.  Big bugs, too."

"One of the more dramatic scenes in the book involves a home-made volcano and the mess it can make.  I probably made 30 volcanoes in my science teaching days, and while the whole vinegar and baking soda thing is messy enough (and pretty awesome), it's the whole paint situation that they don't tell you about.  Because you want your volcano to look realistic, because you've studied real volcanoes.  The problem is, your classroom has tempera paint, and the vinegar-baking soda solution washes it right off the sides of the volcano creating this slick of brown goo (not unlike a mudslide), but easily four times the mess you planned for."