**The Great Qwaznar**

by J.W. McAbee

A cosmic adventure for the curious, the brave, and anyone who has ever pressed a button they probably shouldn't have.

Eleven-year-old Maya Chen is stubborn about facts, keeps seventeen notebooks, and is absolutely certain that cereal boxes do not normally contain cosmic invitations. When the word *Qwaznar* appears on the back of her Cosmic Crunch box-and a glowing locator pod drops into the begonias with a red button clearly labeled "PLEASE DO NOT PRESS"-she does exactly what any thoroughly curious person would do.

She presses it.

Suddenly Maya is rocketing across the galaxy with ZAP-9, a navigation robot who argues with maps, has strong opinions about three coordinates in Sector Seven, and was specifically assigned to prevent another gravitational recalibration. Their mission: help the Grand Galactic Council finally stop arguing about what Qwaznar actually is.

Is it a place at the center of everything? A frequency? The first question one being ever asked about another? A ceremonial sandwich layered with shared experience? Over nine hundred years of debate, forty-seven civilizations have each been certain they alone were right.

Maya, who comes from a quiet Outer Rim planet that hasn't even invented faster-than-light travel, may be the first person who can see what they've all been missing.

Packed with witty world-building, Junior Explorer's Notes, a blank green book that slowly fills itself, and one of the most important sandwiches in the universe, *The Great Qwaznar* is a joyful, big-hearted story about curiosity, asking better questions, and discovering that the most wonderful things in the galaxy are often the ones that make you lean forward and wonder.