Like Salt and Pepper! Melia and Jo by Billie Aronson

Melia loved science. Measuring. Testing. Reading. Observing. Testing again.

In her backyard lab, attired in a pilot's helmet and tall boots, Melia (short for Amelia Earhart) patiently follows the scientific method, observing, experimenting, testing her hypothesis, evaluating, testing again... But...

Most of Melia's creations weren't finished.

The head of her robot keeps falling off and her paper airplane design fails to fly.

Suddenly Melia hears some strange sounds from next door. The sounds were clearly coming from the new girl, who was yelling, whirling, and twirling over the fence.

"I'm Jo!" she said. "But you can call me Jojo. Or Josephine. Or Jo Jo Jo on the Go, Go, Go!"

"You can call me Melia," said Melia.

JoJo flits from one invention to the next, clamping Melia's upside-down colander with antenna on her head, helping herself to a licorice stick, and tossing Melia's paper plane into an unfortunate trajectory. Only a strategic dive by Amelia prevents her plane from nosediving into a mud puddle.

"Too bad your plane doesn't fly like the fluff on a dandelion," JoJo said, demonstrating with a big puff.

Jojo pokes the rest of the licorice stick into the neck of Melia's headless robot, and with a flying jete', skips back into her own yard. Melia sighs with relief as she tries to restore order in her lab. But she can't help making some observations. The licorice stick holds her robot's head on its body better than anything she's tried. The upside-down colander makes a perfect combination portable radio (and sunhat), if you think about it, and with a straw added, a puff of breath makes her plane at last soar on its solo flight.

Melia was shocked. "Jo is a genius!

Can we be a team, Jo? Please....!

"No deal-ya, Melia!" replies Jo.

She turns away and leaps high into a grand tour jete'.

But JoJo is surprised to find that her leap lands her high in a tree. Now it's Melia's turn to think outside the box.

And Melia has just the expansion contraption to extract JoJo from her perch, and both girls have a mutual eureka moment when they realize they are better together, in Billy Aronson's Melia and Jo (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018). Art plus science! A + STEM = STEAM, and together they are the DREAM TEAM. Aronson even appends hands-on directions for readers to create their own breath-powered paper airplane.

It's a celebration of collaboration in Billy Aronson's story of an odd couple of diverse friends who work together like bacon and eggs, peanut butter and jelly, and creativity and reason. Author Aronson, who helped create the Broadway show "Rent" and wrote for the show "The Wonder Pets," "Beevis and Butthead," and "Peg + Cat," collaborates well with his teammate on "The Wonder Pets," artist Jennifer Oxley, the Emmy-winning director of the animated series "Little Bill," "The Wonder Pets," and "Peg + Cat."