Hi, Dill here. I’m the oldest (well by a bit) so it was decided (by me) that I should tell you about us first.

We are the Gastrokids. Anti Pasti calls us that cos we live in GastroHill, not far from downtown. There’s me, Sprout, Pipa oh, yeah, and Olive. That’s us in the picture I made using powerpoint in school. I’m 9 and so is Olive. Sprout is 8 and Pipa is 6 (though she pretends she’s like 8 or something).

We are all friends and we all live next door to each other on Penne Place across from Penne Place Park.

We love the park – it’s where we’ve built a secret hideaway (shhh…don’t tell anyone) and it’s where Grandpa Sage hangs out in his garden. We all go to school not far away at Roquefort Elementary and sometimes after school we visit the library where Anti Pasti works.

Anti Pasti is really cool even if she is old. She’s been all over the world and has these amazing stories about the things she’s seen. We all thought she’d made all that stuff up until she showed us the Book. It’s magic (honest, it is) and when we read the book it takes us on these crazy adventures. We go around the world and back through history. We’ve met Marco Polo and Napoleon and all sorts of people.

My mom doesn’t believe me. She tells me that if I’m going to make up crazy stories – my dad calls it a vivid imajination or something like that – then I might as well write them down. When I told the others they all wanted to write their adventures too because none of their parents believe them either.

Well they are real. You’ll see. We’ve started writing bits of them already and one day we’ll have time to tell you about all of our adventures.