Bridge to Bat City

Product Information

Set for publication in April 2024, the book is described as a “mostly true tall tale” about a recently orphaned young girl named Opal B Flats, who forms an unexpected friendship with a music-loving colony of bats and helps them find a new home against all odds. The book appears to mark something of a departure for Cline from the work in the sci-fi realm for which he’s best known. In Bridge to Bat City, inspired by stories he would tell his kids at bedtime, Ernie Cline has crafted an enchanting tale that weaves together fact and fiction set against the incredible backdrop of 1980s Austin, filled with a vibrant cast of characters, rich music history, activism and environmentalism, and bats!

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.With his signature deep dives into nerdy pop culture futures, Ready Player One author Ernest Cline is one of Austin's biggest-selling authors. Bridge to Bat City' follows Steven Spielberg adapting Cline’s 2011 dystopian, sci-fi novel about a teen's quest to win control over a virtual universe. But with people afraid of the bats and determined to get rid of them, it’ll take a whole lot of courage to prove that this is where the bats—and Opal—belong.

There, Opal bonds with Unclue Roscoe over music and befriends a group of orphaned, music-loving bats. Ernie lives in Austin, Texas, with his family, a time-traveling DeLorean, and a large collection of classic video games. After losing her mother, 13-year-old Opal moves in with her uncle Roscoe on the family farm, and it’s there that she befriends a group of orphaned bats.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. A note to readers: Bold and uncensored, The Austin Chronicle has been Austin’s independent news source for over 40 years, expressing the community’s political and environmental concerns and supporting its active cultural scene. The Austin author has just announced the release date for his debut children's novel, The Bridge to Bat City, set in Austin in the 1980s. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA Enterprise and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Yes, I was the editor of this book and perhaps biased, but I truly love this book and hope you love it as much as I do! The publishing deal for The Bridge to Bat City was brokered by Cline's longtime representatives, manager/producing partner, Dan Farah, and literary agent Yfat Reiss Gendell. Inspiration for the novel stemmed from Cline’s longtime residency in Austin, TX, which is home to the world’s largest urban bat colony.Cline earned his laurels as part of Austin's geek elite in the '90s with his buzzy script, Fanboys, which finally made it to the screen in 2009 in a version starring starring Jay Baruchel, Kristen Bell, Seth Rogen, and Danny Trejo. In the meantime, he busied himself as a star of Austin's slam poetry scene, collecting some of his verses into a chapbook, The Importance of Being Ernest, in 2001, However, it was his debut novel Ready Player One that made him a household name, and it was adapted by Steven Spielberg in 2018. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. Said Little, Brown Books’ Editor-in-Chief Alvina Ling, “In Bridge to Bat City, inspired by stories he would tell his kids at bedtime, Ernie Cline has crafted an enchanting tale that weaves together fact and fiction set against the incredible backdrop of 1980s Austin, filled with a vibrant cast of characters, rich music history, activism and environmentalism, and bats!