What's Your Fossil? 50 State Fossils: by Yinan Wang

Maybe you know that Wisconsin is nicknamed the Badger State, Louisiana is the Pelican State, and California is the Golden State. But did you know they are also the Calymene Trilobite State, the Petrified Palm State, and the Saber-Toothed Tiger State?

Most states also have a state fossil, named for a fossil plant or animal found within their borders. Alaska calls itself the Woolly Mammoth State (of course it does!), and Colorado claims the Stegosaurus. Some states far away from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans have state marine fossils named for their ancient inland sea denizens: Kansas is the Tylosaurus State, that mostly desert state, Nevada, is the Ichthyosaur State, and Missouri owns the name Crinoid Sea Lily as its state fossil. Several seaside states claim ocean-dwelling fossils for their states as well: North Carolina is the Megladon Shark Tooth State, Alabama is the Basilosauarus State and has a fossilized skeleton of the early whale hanging over the great hall in their Museum of Natural History. Several states claim some kind of dinosaur: Utah is the Allosaurus State, and South Dakota is the Triceratops State.

Young fossil hunters and geographical trivia fanciers will find Yinan Wang's The 50 State Fossils: A Guidebook for Aspiring Paleontologists (Schiffer Publishing, 2018) full of fascinating fossils. But this lively illustrated handbook is more than a gee-whiz look at geographical lore for the fifty states.

Scientist Wang explains what fossils are and the different processes (premineralization, mineral replacement, carbonization and original remains preserved in tar or amber) by which they are formed and also offers a run-through of the terminology of time (eons, eras, and epochs) and taxonomy (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species) as background information for middle readers in understanding the paleontology of the United States.. There is a useful appendix--Glossary, Places to See Fossils, bibliography (Further Reading), and Index, including states and scientific terms. With color photographs and illustrative drawings by Jane Levy, this one is great for student doing science and geography research projects and browsers as well, and belongs in libraries serving elementary and middle school students.

Out of My Mind by Sharon M. Draper

By the time I was two, all my memories had words, and all my words had meanings.

But only in my head.

I have never spoken one single word. I am almost eleven years old.

Born with severe cerebral palsy, Melody is trapped inside her body. She has a photographic memory, remembers everything, but the only parts of her body she can control are her thumbs--fine for a TV remote--but of no other help to her or anyone else. Stuck inside her head, she feels like her goldfish, Ollie, trapped in his bowl.

I felt real mellow as I watched Ollie do his thing round and round his bowl.

But suddenly, Ollie dove down to the bottom and hurled himself right out of the bowl. He landed on the table. He gasped and flopped. His eyes bulged and the gills on his side pulsed with effort.

I didn't know what to do. He'd die without water-- So I screamed. Mom didn't come right away. I screamed again. Louder. I screeched, but Mom didn't come running. I had to do something, so I stretched out my arm. I could barely touch Ollie's bowl. I figured if I could get the fish wet, a least I might be able to save him. I pulled. Water splashed everywhere.

Finally I heard my mother thundering up the stairs.

She took one look at the mess and the dying goldfish and shouted, "Melody! What have you done?"

Unable to explain any of it to her mother, Melody feels helpless. She even understands why Ollie wanted out of his bowl. She feels the same way.

But when a well-meaning but unperceptive doctor diagnoses her as mentally retarded, Melody's mother enrolls her in the local school, where she is assigned to the handicapped class. Glad for the change of scene, but stuck with students who cannot even learn the alphabet, she still feels like Ollie circling in his bowl. But like her mother, her sitter believes that Melody's intelligence is high, and on the internet she and Melody find a device, the Medi-Talker, that gives her a voice. Gradually, Melody is moved into the inclusion program and finds herself in fifth-grade classes with other kids, where her vocabulary and memory put her on an even playing field.

One teacher, Mr. Dimming, is the coach of the Quiz Kids team, and in a multiple-choice test, he discovers Melody's encyclopedic knowledge and allows her to join the after-school practice sessions in preparation for the city challenge match. But although Rose seems friendly and talks with Melody during recess, and Connor recognizes her as a worthy opponent for smartest kid in the class, others, particularly Claire and her clique, are cool to her, rolling their eyes and giggling at her behind their hands. Still, Melody makes the team and leads them to the city title, and the Spaulding School Quiz Kids qualify for the national finals in Washington, D.C., with an appearance on Good Morning America and a special tour of the White House.

But when Melody and her family arrive at the airport, they find that all flights have just been cancelled because of bad weather. Then she learns that her classmates had had breakfast together and arrived early enough to make the last flight out for the day--and no one notified her family.It's small comfort to Melody that without her, the team finishes poorly, in ninth place,. Back at school, she has just one question. She types it and turns the volume up loud.

"Why did you leave me?"

Even the teacher squirms, saying that in the run to make the last flight, there was not enough time. Then Connor, clearly uncomfortable, stands up and tells Melody that the team wants her to have their ninth-place trophy. He places it on her tray.

The thing is small, made of cheap plastic painted to look like metal. The name of the school is even spelled wrong on the faceplate.

I look at the ugly little statue, and I start to giggle. Then I crack up.

"I don't want it!" I finally type. Then, turning the volume as loud as it will go, I add...

"YOU DESERVE IT!"

Still laughing, I do a smooth turn and roll myself out of the classroom.

Award-winning author Sharon Draper's Out of My Mind (Atheneum Books, 2014) gives her main character a unique inner and outer voice for those handicapped children who, like Melody, feel trapped inside and yet on display in their own goldfish bowls among normal people. It's easy to say "we're all handicapped in some way," a truism that isn't even true, but Draper doesn't talk down to her readers, telling it like it is, right down to Melody's observation that "going to the bathroom in school sucks." A lot of things about her life do, frankly, but Melody's spirit gives some credence to the strength of the human personality to overcome. With a first-person narrator, the reader sees the adults and kids in Melody's world only through her eyes, but the personal point of view is essential to the power of this novel. Middle readers will find this book uncomfortable, yet fascinating, a way to escape their own limited viewpoints of others. As Kirkus says in their starred review, "Unflinching and realistic, ...rich in details of both the essential normalcy and the difficulties of a young person with cerebral palsy."

Judge and Jury: The Lemonade Crime by Jacqueline Davies

It had happened just last week. Right in the middle of that heat wave. They'd all been at Jack's house. All the guys--Paul and Ryan and Kevin and Malik and Scott--were playing pool basketball. Evan had $208 in the pocket of his shorts. It was more money than he'd ever seen in his whole life. He'd left his shorts folded on the bed in Jack's bedroom while they all went swimming. But then Scott got out to go to the bathroom. And a minute later he came running out of the house, saying he had to go home right away. And when Evan went back in the house to get dressed, the money was gone.

Two Hundred and eight dollars! That was the sum total of the money he and his sister Jessie had made all summer, competitors in rival lemonade stands in the hot sun, the lemonade war between him and Jessie that they had just resolved, agreeing to share their profits.

And now Scott is bragging to everyone that he has a new X Box 20/20, not even yet on the market, that his mom had gotten through her Japanese business connections. It seems an open and shut case. As legal-minded Jessie puts it, Scott had the opportunity and the means, and now his motive is clear. It's an open and shut case.

Still, Scott denies any guilt, and the dispute between Evan and Scott causes a split among their friends. The whole fourth grade has become two camps in the throes of a crime and punishment drama.

At last Jessie takes things into her rational hands and manages to set up a real trial set on the playground after school, with an impartial judge and jury of peers drawn by lots. She will represent her brother, and she is sure her evidence will sway the jury. But Scott refuses her offer of counsel, and insists he will be his own attorney. Then Megan, Jessie's best friend, insists on making the trial fair by pleading Scott's case, that he should be acquitted on the basis that the evidence against him is purely circumstantial. Jessie loses the case and, it seems, her best friend as well.

But Evan is angry at the injustice of it all and challenges Scott to a trial by ordeal on the basketball court--seven points, sudden death, no ref, no fouls, winner take all--and if Scott is defeated, he is presumed guilty.

And does Evan win that game! Scott is humiliated, hands and knees and nose bloodied, his only revenge kicking the ball into the swampy woods beside the playground for Evan to search for. Still Evan should feel justified. He is the winner, right? Then why does he feel like he's a loser?

In her sequel to the top-selling The Lemonade War (The Lemonade War Series), Jacqueline Davis's, The Lemonade Crime (Houghton Mifflin, 2011), is a tightly woven exploration into the fine points beyond legal justice, of what right and wrong mean, set in a believable milieu of fourth-grade social relationships. The author's well-constructed plot manages to see justice done in a way that also finds a place for atonement and forgiveness. Although the two books are best read in sequence, this newest one can stand alone, thanks to Davis's skill in exposition in the early chapters. It's a great read for middle elementary students, with strong boy and girl protagonists, and one which also gives the reader something to think about all the way to the final paragraph.

Booklist, in a rare starred review, says ..."this involving and, at times, riveting chapter book has something to say and a deceptively simple way of saying it."

Homeless in the Great Plains: Room One by Andrew Clements

Families without homes are unknown in Plattsford, Nebraska. Instead there are homes without families in Plattsford, a small prairie town gradually dying as more and more residents move away and leave abandoned farms behind.

But when Ted Hammond, the solitary sixth-grader in his now one-room school, sees a girl's face behind the window of a left-behind farmhouse, his hobby of reading detective mysteries kicks in. Back with his notebook after school for a quick look around, Ted's investigations lead him to April, whose mother and little brother are hiding inside the delapidated house. A girl about his age, April reluctantly tells Ted that her father was killed in Iraq and that their elderly car broke down nearby on the way to her aunt' home in Colorado. April's mother is too proud to ask for public help, so Ted promises to take on the project of taking food to the family without his own family's knowledge.

While making a second supply run to the deserted farm, Ted is spotted by his teacher, who questions him about trespassing on the property. Ted is torn between his promise to April, his reluctance to lie to his teacher, and his duty as a citizen to find long-term assistance for the homeless family.

As in his recent novel, No Talking, reviewed here July 23, Clements' talent for combining deep character development, absorbing plot, and the realistic introduction of genuine moral considerations into his work shows up here in Room One. For novels in which the natural drive of boys for novelty and action leads to unforeseen consequences, Andrew Clements is the modern master. His outcomes, never ex machina, require his main characters to use their ingenuity and consider social value systems in their resolution.

Past Perfect: Archer's Quest by Linda Sue Park

Newbery Award winner (A Single Shard, 2002) Linda Sue Park turns from her metier, the historical novel, to kid-pleasing time travel fantasy with a pleasant touch of Korean history, in her recent Archer's Quest.

Sixth-grader Kevin is a bit bored. Home alone because of a half-holiday from school, he's bouncing a superball around his room half-heartedly when suddenly an arrow pins his baseball cap to the wall without harming a hair on his head.

"Show me your hands, Strange One," a grim voice says.

"My arrow would end your life before you took a single step," he said. "Do not even think of fleeing."

Kevin's strange visitor is Asian, twenty-something, long haired, dressed in a white outfit vaguely like a karate instructor, with a bow and a quiver full of mean-looking arrows. He demands that Kevin answer his questions but ask none of his own.

"Little frog," he instructs, "...Ask the questions in your head, and then listen. The answers and more will come to you."

For Kevin, a third generation Korean-American, history is a bunch of dull, meaningless names and dates. He's pretty good at math, when he tries, but his parents are always nagging him to focus on things, to pay attention and learn everything he can. Now, he suddenly finds himself responsible for returning a warrior king, Koh Chu-Mong, back to the first century B.C. in Korea. Obliquely, without asking questions, Kevin learns that some strange confluence of magic, the Chinese Zodiac, and the cycle of elements--fire, earth, metal, water, and wood--has trapped Chu-Mong in Kevin's hometown of Dorcester, New York. There's only one day left in the Year of the Tiger, and Kevin fears that it's up to him to return the strange interloper to his own time before midnight.

There is plenty of humor along the way as Chu-Mong comes up with his own interpretation of the technology of Kevin's time--computers that contact magic spirits, cars that move with tiny fire dragons inside, and Chinese restaurants with stick-like eating tools. Kevin sneaks his visitor into the local museum to consult an authority on Korean history, learning that Chu-Mong was indeed known as the Great Archer, famed for his skill, and that he did unite his people into a progressive kingdom, even introducing chopsticks to Korea. The final pieces of the puzzle do not fall into place until Kevin does the math, using the twelve-year Chinese Zodiac and five-year cycle of the elements to deduce that he must bring Chu-Mong together with metal, a tiger, and earth to send him back to his own time. There's a bit of suspense as Kevin frets about getting his strange-looking guest through the city streets and campus of his local university, but at last the Great Archer mounts the bronze statue of a tiger which is the college's mascot and, with one last calendar re-calculation by Kevin, disappears safely back to his own time.

Park slips her bits of Korean history, folklore, and Asian self-discipline into the story skillfully, and there's enough suspense in Kevin's race against the Chinese calendar to keep readers turning the pages to the end of this well written fantasy. Kids who are familiar with the beginning chapters of the Time Warp Trio books by John Scieszka will feel right at home as they move up to this middle grader time travel tale by Linda Sue Park.