Hard Lessons! Samantha Hansen Has Rocks In Her Head by Nancy Viau

"Aaargh! Samantha Hansen! Get your stupid rocks out of here. I want them gone!"

It's just Jen, my big sister. Jen likes to boss people around. So what if I'm ten years old? I don't need a boss who's fifteen. I rush to the bathroom to make sure Jen didn't touch my rocks.

"Rocks can't be stupid!" I yell back to Jen. "They don't have brains!" I peek inside the egg carton. They were touched, all right.

"Sam!" Mom calls from down the hall. "Stop yelling!" Jen does her eye-roll thing--and grins. My sister loves when I get in trouble.

I know my mouth has a mind of its own. I can't help it.

Sam admits that she has rocks on her head most of the time. She loves their different textures and colors, she loves that some can even be fluorescent under special lights, and she loves being the expert on rocks in her class. Her special rock assortment is carefully nestled in its egg carton and she's hoping her teacher will give her an A+ on her science project. She's even planned a production on fluorescent minerals with special lights that show off their glow-in-the-dark properties for her entry in the grade-level talent show. But her temper sometimes gets ahead of her.

And then Mom has a big announcement--a mini-vacation to the Grand Canyon.

"It would be good for you and me and Jen to get away. Just us girls," Mom says. "But you have to learn to put a lid on that temper of yours."

The Grand Canyon is like a dream come true for a rock scientist like me. I'm going to need a very tight lid. And quite possibly a different sister.

It's a rocky week for Sam, trying hard to control her angry words, but she and Jen pull off a surprise early birthday party that softens Mom's mood, and at last they are there, actually hiking with backpacks together down Bright Angel Trail!

The canyon is huge! The rock layers sit on top of each other like Mom's layered cake, but here each layer is a different kind of rock The colors bounce off my eyeballs. Maybe I'll find a rare mammoth fossil named for me.

Sam's petrological knowledge impresses their guide Chad, and she sparkles like a mica specimen when he asks her to be his assistant. But that night in their camp, Sam is awakened by her mom. Jen is missing, and Mom needs help finding her sister in the dark at the foot of the canyon, and in the course of that stormy night Sam uncovers a lot about her Mom and how her Dad died suddenly, and even how much she cares about her sister.

In Nancy Viau's Samantha Hansen Has Rocks in Her Head (Schiffer Publishing, 2019), Sam learns a lot about the science of geology, but, to her surprise, something about human psychology, too--that feelings are like rocks--there's often a lot about them buried below the surface. There's a lot to learn out there, and the likable Samantha Larsen is about to learn how to dig it all. Viau's page-turning middle-reader novel is what Beverly Cleary called "funny-sad," a chunk of real family life, with its everyday conflicts and its victories, and, as rock lovers might put it, it's a really gneiss summer read! And readers should keep their eyes out on the trail for Nancy Viau's Samantha sequel, Something Is Bugging Samantha Hansen, forthcoming August 28, 2019.