Since Listen Taylor's dad started dating a Zing, her life has gone from unusual to downright weird. The delightfully mad Zing family live in a world of unexplained projects, coded conversations and state-of-the-art surveillance equipment - all to protect the Zing family secret, one so huge it draws them all, including Listen's dad, to the garden shed for meetings every Friday night. And Listen isn't invited. But Listen also has things she'd rather keep hidden - a secret too heartbreaking to share and an unconventional spell book (with a spell to make a vacuum cleaner break and another to make someone eat cake?!) that might be the answer to her problems.