In Linette Moore's debut, middle-grade graphic novel, eleven-year-old Helga Sharp is found unconscious in a drifting rowboat near the coast of Utley Island. Utley, as Helga finds out when she awakens in the hospital, is forbidden territory: it's a prison island to which the Mainland has exiled troublesome mad scientists for generations. The truth is, it's no accident that Helga landed here. She is a keen inventor, but the Mainland is suspicious of all scientists and inventors. While working on her projects in secret, Helga made radio contact with Erasmus Lope, a mad genius who everyone thought  had died in a lab experiment gone spectacularly wrong. But Lope is alive, and Helga is on a mission to rescue him from the prison island. Now Helga must find a way to break Lope out, right under the noses of the family of famous heroes that run Utley Island. There's only one big problem-Lope's trapped inside a giant crystal in the mad scientists' museum!