Book excerpt: Nicholas Allen has plenty of ideas. Who can forget the time he turned the classroom into a tropical island, or the times he has fooled the teacher by chirping like a blackbird? But now it looks like his days as a troublemaker are over. Now Nick is in Mrs Granger's class - she who has X-ray vision - and everyone knows that nobody gets away with anything in her classroom. To make matters worse, Mrs Granger is also fanatical about the dictionary - which Nick thinks is so boring. But then inspiration strikes and Nicholas invents his greatest plan yet: to create a new word. From now on, a pen is no longer a pen - it's a frindle. It doesn't take long to catch on and soon the excitement has spread well beyond the school and town . . . but frindle doesn't belong to Nick anymore, it has a life of it's own, and all Nick can do now, is sit back and watch what happens.