Saved by the Smell
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
A boy gets buried in dirty laundry and pulled into time travel shenanigans after his mom’s latest experiment in this first book in the My Mad Scientist Mom chapter book series from acclaimed author-illustrator Jarrett Lerner.
Ari’s life is filled with school, video games, and his pet turtle, Fred: pretty run-of-the mill stuff. But not anywhere near run-of-the-mill is Ari’s mom, who’s a mad scientist. That’s right, a MAD scientist. Sure, she strives to make people’s lives better with her inventions, especially at home. But all of Mom’s inventions seem to go just the slightest bit off kilter. And when she devises a time portal to help deal with the massive mounds of dirty laundry that have taken over their house, she creates a MUCH bigger problem than just stinky clothes, and it’s up to Ari to get them out of a prehistoric mess.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Middle schooler Ari's mother—a scientist with a knack for finding often-catastrophic solutions to problems most other scientists (and nonscientists) don't believe need solving—is unlike his classmates' mothers. Few kids, for example, must dodge laser beams from their parents' inventions. With laundry piling up, Ari's mom, wearing her last clean lab coat and fielding comments from her ice cube–size supercomputer creation about Ari "having started smelling funky four days ago," neither repairs the family's washing machine nor heads to a laundromat. Instead, she invents a time portal to take the family back to when they last had fresh clothing. When mother, son, and pet turtle Fred are inadvertently transported to the Cretaceous Period and the time portal's remote control is destroyed, the trio must run for their lives in a dinosaur-populated landscape—until a side effect of Ari's odor proves an unexpected savior. Early readers will delight in Ari's wild adventures with his quirky and loving mad scientist mom in this good-humored series kickoff by Lerner (the Nat the Cat series), punctuated by crisp, unadorned line drawings. Character skin tones match the hue of the page. Ages 5–8.
