There is a new deadly illness on Earth. Starbright Connor is beginning to wonder why everyone in Claircomb has gone so wuzzling mad over some mysterious sickness that is probably just a media scare. Early symptoms suggest disturbed sleep patterns. Starbright thinks spindle sickness is something that happens only to other people, until the day her best friend, Mark, falls asleep and won't wake up. In five years there will be no place to run to. Now Starbright must strike out on her own. But how is a twelve-year-old supposed to save the world?

But why, suddenly, the big wahoo on spindle sickness? Everyone had talked for years about it, a virus disease in remote South America, then in Africa, Australia. People got tired and went to sleep and didn't wake up. How could it be here, less than thirty miles away? Nah. Wasn't possible. An outbreak would be too unreal for words...

Author Joy Cowley is the award-winning author of over 40 books for children and young adults, including The Silent One, which The New York Times Educational Supplement hailed as a book "that will not be forgotten" and The Horn Book called "brilliantly evocative." Ms. Cowley is also the author of Singing Down the Rain, illustrated by Jan Spivey Gilchrist, and Starbright and the Dream Eater. Ms. Cowley lives in New Zealand.